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　　English cleft sentence is a kind of sentence structure of emphasis, which has aspecial structure and flexible expression. And it is widely used in spoken and writtenlanguage that is a very useful means of language communication. Many grammarbooks have talked about it, but I believe that it is necessary to further explore the cleftsentence.

　　
　　1.1 Definition of the cleft sentence分裂句的定义
　　The scholars who study English come up the cleft sentence initially. The reasonwhy cleft sentence is so-called is that focus and presupposition are separated by theparticular structure in this kind of construction. For example:(1)A. Mrs. Smith is driving a car.B. It’s a new car that Mrs. Smith is driving.C. Mrs. Smith is driving something.(1A) is a general narrative sentence and (1B) is a sentence that will be discussedin this paper.The cleft sentence, as a marked clause, has been a focus in language today. It hasbeen made a topic of extensive studies by many later grammarians. To cite just asmall number of their definitions:In Quirk et al’s A Grammar of Contemporary English, he gives cleft sentence adefinition: “a special construction which gives both thematic and focal prominence toa particular element of the clause…, so called because it divides a single clause intotwo separate sections, each with its own verb” (Quirk, et al, 1972:951).“The cleft sentence derives its name from the fact that a single clause is ‘cleft’ intotwo separate clause-like parts. But it is generally analyzed as a single clause with twopredicators, rather than as two separate clauses.” (Leech et al, 1982:126)“Cleft sentence: a sentence which has been divided into two parts, each with itsown verb, to emphasize a particular piece of information……For example, thesentence (2) Mr. Black gave Tom a pen, can be changed into the cleft sentencesbelow:(2a)It was Mr. Black who gave Tom a pen.(2b)It was to Tom that Mr. Black gave the pen.(2c)It was a pen that Mr. Black gave to Tom. (Richards et al, 1985:40)“Cleft sentence: A sentence derived from another by dividing the latter into twoclauses, each with its own finite verb, so as to place emphasis on a particularcomponent of the original sentence”. (Chalker and Weiner, 1994:63)Biber et al (2000: 958-963) defines the cleft sentence that is the same as Quirk etal’s opinion. Biber et al (2000) points out that “clefting is similar to dislocation in thesense that information that could be given in a single clause is broken up, in this caseinto two clauses,https://www.51lunwen.org/languagethesis/ each with its own verb”. Biber et al’s definition indicates Quirk etal’s influence on him.The above definitions are different in wording, but they have nearly the samemeaning: cleft sentences are derived from a single sentence by dividing it into twoparts, each with its own verb. However, this thesis hopes to discuss the cleft sentenceby using Figure/ground theory and the prominence view.

　　
　　1.2 The significance of the study研究的意义
　　The cleft sentence, as a particular form of structure in English, has been a focusin language study. It’s easy to find a lot of descriptions about the cleft sentence andrules of the cleft sentence as well. However, it’s still difficult for the English learnersto use this structure, for scholars from differen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。