ABSTRACT
The adoption of a corpus-based approach to the study of cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions has proved to have a number of advantages. Such an approach has enabled distributional tendencies to be investigated empirically across a broad range of genres. The figures thus derived are, it has been demonstrated, relatable to grammatical and informational/thematic features. Furthermore, study of the functions and distribution of clefts and pseudo-clefts across a variety of spoken and written registers provides a potential source of hypotheses about the textual organization of discourse.
