A Study On English Cleft Sentence In Perspective Of Construction Grammar

Cleft sentence is universal sentence patterns in languages,the studies of English cleft sentence are widely discussed by linguists.Traditional approach,Generative approach,Functional approach and Cognitive approach studied this sentence from different aspects,and most of these studies involved the definition,origin and function of the cleft sentence.This thesis tries to reclassify cleft construction,and to describe the features of every kind of cleft construction in form and meaning from perspective of the construction grammar.Based on the previous definition of cleft sentence,through observing important features of collected language materials from BNC,this thesis put forward the universal form of cleft construction: it be + Immediate Constituent(IC)+ that/who +Cleft Clause(CC).As for classification of cleft construction,Collins(1991)discussed Idiom clefts in his study.Pattern(2010)indicated predicational and proverbial and informative-presuppositional clefts in his study.Their researches have proved that there are different types of cleft sentence.But there is no systematic standard of cleft classification.According to Goldberg's construction theory and collected language materials,this thesis reclassified cleft construction in two main types: Substantive Cleft Construction and Schematic Cleft Construction.The former contains Idiom Cleft Construction,while the latter contains Specificational Cleft Construction,Predicational Cleft Construction and Information Presuppositional Cleft Construction.Then,this thesis discussed form and meaning characteristics of all kinds of cleft constructions.it shows that the form of Substantive Construction(Idiom Cleft Construction)is not open of its constituents,the IC and CC part can not be changed casually.The meaning feature is that this construction just expresses a conventional meaning,and there is no contrastive meaning in its constituents.While as for Schematic Cleft Construction,there are three situations: the first is the typical cleft construction: Specificational Cleft Construction.The form of it can be described that the constituents of it is completely open and its IC part is usually areferential rather than a descriptive expression.The meaning is clear that IC part is also the focus part,and it expresses the contrastive meaning.In other words,it expresses exclusiveness(IC part is a list of exhaustiveness in involved variable.).Next type is Predicational Cleft Construction.Its form feature is that its IC part is usually a descriptive form which can be replaced by other descriptive words and other clauses as the same as CC part.Its meaning excluded contrastive meaning.The last type of Schematic Cleft Construction is Information Presuppositional Cleft Construction.It can be considered as the edge category of Specificational Cleft construction.Its form of IC part is not totally fixed.It just put information in that place.And its meaning is not contrastive in its constituents.This study developed the classification of Cleft Construction,explained the form and meaning of each type of cleft construction,and provided a new train of thought for the future research on Cleft construction.