The case of focus
This article investigates the distribution of pronoun case forms (PCFs) in it-clefts and it BE-sentences in British and American English. Its particular interest is the occurrence of subject PCFs in these two constructions. Functional and pragmatic factors exerting an influence on the distribution are identified, such as first vs. third person, singular vs plural. All these factors are operationalized and quantified in the datasets. The findings confirm the hypothesis that subject PCFs have been re-functionalised as Focus markers in the two varieties examined. As the explanation of this refunctionalization, markedness reversal is put forward.
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Bevacqua, Luca & Tatjana Scheffler
2020.
Form variation of pronominal it-clefts in written English.
Linguistics Vanguard 6:1
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