This thesis analyses the distribution of the different functions of the subject it in two text types: academic prose and fiction. The objective of the thesis is to discover to what extent and in which aspects the two examined text types differ. The analysis is based on two hundred examples of it in the subject function obtained from the British National Corpus (BNC), one half of them drawn from academic prose, the other from fiction. The functions of it analysed include anaphoric it, anticipatory it, empty it and it as the subject in a cleft sentence (focusing it). The discussion of anaphoric it focuses on the distance of the referent from the pronoun, the realisation form and semantic role of the referent; in the case of anticipatory it, attention is paid to the type of subordinate clause realising the extraposed subject and the realisation form and semantics of the predicate in the superordinate clause; for the cleft sentence, the analysis deals mainly with the realisation form and underlying syntactic function of the focused element. Additionally, the instances of it that did not fit into any of the four main categories are also examined. The two text types are first discussed separately, and the findings are then compared in the final part of the thesis. Key words: anaphoric it, anticipatory...
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:nusl.cz/oai:invenio.nusl.cz:343737 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Fišerová, Helena |
| Contributors | Dušková, Libuše, Šaldová, Pavlína |
| Source Sets | Czech ETDs |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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