Enhanced theme in English : towards a functional explanation of the 'it-cleft' construction

A study of the "it-cleft" construction, an important and much-disputed construction in language, this work is based on a large corpus of contextualized examples.

The construction may occur only a dozen times in a novel, but it always occurs at a highly significant point.

The book adopts an explicitly functional approach at every point, as it works towards a full socio-cognitive description of the construction.As this account of a single construction unfolds, the reader is also given a picture of an integrated theory of language and its use.

The theory is both cognitive and social; it is a systemic functional grammar which is itself set within a higher "grammar" of discourse, and which operates as a key component in an overall model of interpersonal communication - including a continually-changing model of what the addressee "knows".