Abstract
The English cleft construction is a device that can fulfil multiple functions, one of which is expressing information structure, in Prague School-based research known as functional sentence perspective (FSP). Various FSP studies (Firbas 1992, Chamonikolasová and Adam, 2005, etc.) suggest the existence of two main tendencies (plus some subtypes) in information structure of a sentence, which are referred to as dynamic semantic scales: Presentation scale, which introduces a new element on the scene, and Quality scale, which ascribes a quality to a bearer of quality.
Clefting is one of the ways to express information structure more explicitly, but its relation to dynamic semantic scales has not yet been widely studied. This paper presents a preliminary, corpus-based analysis of English it-clefts with focused subject; the material is extracted from Intercorp, a multilingual translation corpus.
The main goals are to analyse the FSP function of it-clefts with the help of some existing criteria (e.g. classification by Prince, 1978) and ultimately their Czech translation equivalents - a comparative analysis with Czech (a language with different means of expressing FSP) could contribute to a better understanding of the issue.