<Articles> DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS OF CLEFT SENTENCES IN ENGLISH

Cleft sentences contain what is called Presupposition, the content of which can never be influenced by negative transformation. Incidentally, what we should take special note of is the relationships between presupposition and its informational status. Although presupposition is often identified with the notion given, it is not always to be so. It should be kept in mind that the former is a logico-semantic notion; on the other hand, the latter is a discourse notion, as indicated by Prince (1978:887,898). In this paper, it is proposed that it-clefts and inverted wh-clefts have three identical types of informational structure, while non-inverted wh-clefts (hereafter indicated as wh-clefts) have only one type. Meanwhile, the relationship between the informational structure and the thematic structure is shown at the same time. Furthermore, through the examination of the three types of clefts with reference to different examples from various texts, three chief discourse functions are proposed: 1. the function of topic-continuity, 2. the function of introducing new information, 3. the function of setting the scene