The cleft focus position and the it-cleft construction

In contrast to conjuncts and disjuncts, adjuncts can be the focus of an it-cleft construction (Quirk et al. 1985: 504). As noted in section 3.1.2, the cleft focus position is not a commonly recognised adverbial position and might be considered a variant of either medial or end position. However, the cleft construction is in itself interesting, and adjuncts in cleft focus merit some examination. The interest lies in the nature of the focused adjunct as well as the discourse function of the whole it-cleft construction in context. Since adjuncts in cleft focus position are rare in the core corpus (see figure 3.2), the present chapter is based on the whole ICE-GB. An example of an adjunct in cleft focus position is shown in (1).

1. (1) Can we call a special meeting or something?

2. Maybe just that it's this week that uhm there aren't enough people around <S1B-078>

The it-cleft construction has been characterised both as a focusing construction (e.g. Prince 1978, Gundel 2002) and as a thematising construction (e.g. Gómez-González 2001). The construction allows a speaker/writer to spread the information of a single proposition over two clauses and, consequently, two information units. Using the terminology of, for example, Gundel (2002) and Delin (1992), the it-cleft construction is described here in terms of a clefted constituent and a cleft clause.