ABSTRACT
A number of analyses of cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions have been proposed to account for such aspects of their surface syntax as have been discussed in the previous chapter, as well as various ‘connectedness’ phenomena suggesting a close structural relationship between the highlighted element and relative clause. A detailed survey of these analyses would be beyond the scope of this book. In this chapter I shall indicate the type of analysis that is assumed in the study and examine several formal properties displayed by clefts and pseudoclefts in the corpus (for which any adequate formal analysis of the constructions should be able to account). In subsequent chapters I shall offer explanations for a number of these properties in terms of the communicative functions of clefts and pseudo-clefts.
