Acquiring proficiency in academic genres is a key factor in research community. Among various genres in academic discourse communities, spoken genre, especially Conference Presentations (CPs), play a crucial role in research communities, though investigation on this important genre is in its infancy or is relatively under-researched. Therefore, the present study aims to shed light on the import...

It is well known that natural languages may syntactically encode the focus/presupposition divide; we refer to it as the assertion content of the sentence. One construction that overtly and unambiguously structures this aspect of the meaning of a sentence is the pseudo-cleft and, in particular, the so-called specificational pseudo-cleft (Higgins 1976), where the post-copula constituent specifies...

• Pseudoclefts recur in Swedish everyday and institutional interaction. There are both integrated biclausal clefts non-integrated variants. Typical pseudoclefts frame a contribution with speaker stance. attract focus to shifts the progression of discourse. contribute creating discourse, used by expert participant. In this study we present an interactional linguistic analysis based on audio vide...

The present study mainly examines the cleft acquisition of Mandarin children. In our study, we observed learners' performances from four main perspectives, i.e., syntactic complexity effects, cleft types, age effects and developmental effects. The results of this study gave support that syntactic construction was an important factor affecting children's language acquisition. Also, different cle...

We present a male infant with hypertelorism, median pseudo-cleft of the upper lip and cleft palate, lobulated tongue, hypoplastic larynx and epiglottis, mesomelic shortening of limbs with particularly short and broad tibiae, polydactyly of the upper limbs, severely hypoplastic external genitalia with anorchidism, anal atresia, severe congenital heart defect, and renal agenesis. These features s...

Within the framework of utterance production theories “à la française”, different approaches enunciative heterogeneity have been developed since end 1970’s in interaction, re-work, and re-appropriation notions polyphony dialogism borrowed from Bakhtin Circle. These approaches, beyond their differences, had little interest prosodic, vocal gestural dimensions discursive units under study.It is th...

The shi...de construction in Mandarin Chinese is a cover term for at least four distinct constructions. We focus on the remarkable internal properties of the shi...de pattern proper, where both shi and de are present. We concur with a long tradition of scholarship identifying shi...de as a cleft construction, but we show it to have very different properties from itor pseudo-clefts in languages ...

Information structure can be invoked to explain the choice of voice in the scientific researcharticle. However, manipulation of information structure can give rise to clause forms other thansimple active/passive structures. The main candidates are cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences,inversion, extraposition and existential sentences. Study of a corpus shows that while the firstthre...

Contrastively focused constituents in Malagasy, a verb-initial language, occur at the left edge of the clause, separated from the remainder of the clause by the particle no (previous work has shown that no forms a constituent with what follows it, here called the NO-PHRASE). The Malagasy focus construction is usually analyzed as a pseudo-cleft: the focus phrase constitutes the main predicate of...