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emantic meaning and can therefore be deleted.This view holds that thepronoun and the copula verb in it-cleft construction are semantically empty.Laterscholars,such as Quirk(1985),held basically the same view with him,and they alsobelieved that'It'had no meaning and only acted as the antecedent subject in thesentence.

Chapter Three Theoretical Framework.......................25

3.1 Figure-Ground Theory..........................25

3.1.1 Principles of Figure and Ground.........................25

3.1.2 Characteristics of Figure and Ground.............................27

Chapter Four Analysis of It-Cleft Construction Based on Figure-Ground.............37

4.1 The Syntactic Idiosyncrasy................................37

4.1.1 Transformation Between Cleft Constituent and Cleft Clause...................37

4.1.2 Focualized Components................................41

Chapter Five Conclusion................................67

5.1 Major Findings.....................................67

5.2 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Study......................69

Chapter Four Analysis of It-Cleft Construction Basedon Figure-Ground

4.1 The Syntactic Idiosyncrasy

The it-cleft construction is a quite unique kind of construction.The it-cleftconstruction is a marked and emphasized sentence pattern that makes differentcomponents become the focus by moving sentence components.

4.1.1 Transformation Between Cleft Constituent and Cleft Clause

The figure and ground both exist in the perceptual field at the same time,but theycannot be perceived and understood as the same thing at the same time.In other words,the states between them are not equal.It is generally believed that figure is the most obvious part in cognition,which dominates the focus of attention.The ground is notdominant in cognition with a low degree of prominence.However,in an isolatedsentence(without context),it is difficult to decide which one is the figure,and whichone is the ground.According to people's subjective perspectives,they may choosedifferent components to be figure or ground.For example:

(17)I play football in the park.

Without specific context,it is impossible to tell which is the figure and which isthe ground.The emphasized object(figure)can be subject,predicate,object or adverbial.It can be seen that isolated sentences(without context)are unmarked expressions,whichlack the opposition between figure and ground,and none of its components areemphasized.However,from the perspective of communication and function,thecomponent that bears the greatest communication load is the component that the speakerwants to highlight,which is generally new information.When conveying newinformation,the speaker often needs to provide a certain context first,so that thereceiver can accept the new information smoothly.This context consists of informationknown to the addressee.Therefore,an ordinary clause is usually a structure of'knowninformation+new information',and the components at the end of the sentence have agreater chance of becoming new information,bearing the greatest communicative load,and are often the components that the speaker wants to highlight本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。