The functionality of it-clefts in selected discourses: The message in the medium

AbstractInformation in a discourse can be obtained by analyzing several different linguistic properties of the discourse. Various syntactic and semantic triggers provide clues to the complex informational structure of a discourse. For the purposes of this investigation, we selected several discourses taken from a series of wire service messages dealing with terrorist incidents that occurred in Central America from 1989 to 1991. The corpus is known as the “MUC-3” corpus. Because of their inferential properties, we identified it-cleft constructions in the corpus. We argue that, despite their rarity in the corpus under investigation, it-clefts provide additional information, and do not just contrast or emphasize focused linguistic material, such as noun or prepositional phrases. By substituting so-called “normal” word order, or SVO paraphrases, for the it-clefts in the messages, we determined what information the it-cleft sentences provided in the discourse. Our investigation reveals that, as a subset of the...