A Constructional Approach To All-Cleft Construction

All-cleft construction is an important sub-type of pseudo-cleft construction, which plays an indispensable part in the integrated and systematic study on identifying construction. In the previous studies on pseudo-cleft construction, scholars have paid more attention to the exploration of wh-cleft construction with all-cleft construction and the-cleft construction being neglected to some extent. Therefore, based on research findings made by all these distinguished scholars, this thesis intends to make a tentative analysis of all-cleft construction from three aspects. First of all, this thesis tends to reclassify all-cleft construction. Then, the syntactic features and semantic interpretation of all-cleft construction will be discussed. Thirdly, this thesis would like to explore the motivation of its form and meaning. We make these studies with a purpose of contributing our efforts to the systematic and integrated study of identifying construction.According to the definition of clefts and pseudo-clefts given by Collins(1991), this thesis will define all-cleft construction as a construction expressing a relationship of identifying by connecting ‘all-headed nominal clause’ and ‘highlighted element’(YP) with the copula ‘be’. Thus, its form will be discribed in this thesis as ‘All+S+be+YP’( S represents a nominal clause headed by ‘all’). As for the types of all-cleft construction, it is divided it into three types: the predicational, the specificational and the equative. Furthermore, when it comes to the semantic interpretation carried by all-cleft construction, we argue that all-cleft construction carries the presupposition of existence in meaning. Especially in the specificational all-cleft construction, we believe that it has an implicature of exclusiveness in meaning because of the contrastive focus it contains. Besides, among all hypotheses put forward on motivation of the pseudo-cleft construction, this thesis will mainly discuss the Deletion Analysis and Question-Answer Pair. Moreover, we will explain the motivation of all-cleft construction in light of schema hierarchy theory and semantic integration principles.Therefore, this thesis insists that as a significant member of identifying construction, all-cleft construction inherits some syntactic features and the meaning of ‘identifying something’ from identifying construction. Of all the three types of all-cleft construction, this study will mainly discuss the specificational all-cleft construction which is regarded as the prototype of identifying construction. More specifically, this thesis explores the function of the word ‘all’, the form of ‘be’, the component constraints on ‘YP’ and the relationship between ‘S’ and ‘YP’ in all-cleft construction. Besides, its presupposition of existence and implicature of exclusiveness in meaning will also be discussed. Moreover, we find that it is reasonable to explain the motivation of all-cleft construction with the Question-Answer Pair hypothesis for both of which carry the contrastive focus. The motivation of its form and meaning can also be explained with the help of schema hierarchy theory and semantic integration principles. Under the direction of Adele E. Goldberg’s constructional approach, this thesis tends to describe all-cleft construction in a comprehensive way. Therefore, the study of all-cleft construction may allow us to find the similarities and differences among different sub-types of identifying construction and further let us complete an integrated study of identifying construction.