Sino-US English Teaching, February 2020, Vol. 17, No. 2, 58-64 doi:10.17265/1539-8072/2020.02.002 D DAVID PUBLISHING

Characteristics of the Use of Cleft Sentences in English Majors’ Compositions

YANG Tao  University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China GU Yan Xuzhou Kindergarten Teachers College, Xuzhou, China

The study reported in this paper is a corpus-based study in which it-clefts, wh-clefts, and inverted wh-clefts in the writings of Chinese college students and those of their British counterparts are compared. And it is intended to investigate into the characteristics of the use of cleft sentences in Chinese English majors’ writings and the factors that may possibly contribute to these features. The findings show that similarities and disparities are both found in cleft use between the two groups of writers, and the distinctions should not simply be labeled as “over-use” or “under-use”, for features like reductionism, parochialism, and avoidance in Chinese students’ use of cleft sentences are also revealed through deeper analysis.

Keywords: cleft sentence, English writings, corpus

Theoretical Background Definition of Cleft Sentences According to Bibber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finnegan (1999) and others, cleft structure refers to the syncopation of the meaning that can be expressed in a clause. Namely two clauses together form a logically uncomplicated proposition that can usually be expressed by a simple sentence. The earliest focus on the cleft structure came from the English grammarians, such as H. Fowler and F. Fowler (1931) and Jespersen (1949); in fact, the term “cleft sentence” was proposed by Jespersen. It is more universally accepted to classify them into three types, “it” cleft sentences, “wh” cleft sentences, i.e., pseudo cleft sentences, and inverted “wh” cleft sentences. Nature of Cleft Sentences According to the generative grammar, it can be considered that the cleft sentence has the same deep syntactic structure as the synonymous basic sentence. Psycholinguistics believes that the prominence of information determines the choice and arrangement of information in the language structure (Bibber et al., 1999). In most languages, semantic prominence and emphasis are mainly achieved by the omission and rearrangement of sentence components (Werth, 1984). The structure of cleft places an ingredient in the focus, or a special part of the sentence with the same aim to highlight the component (Sinclair & Collins, 1990); Hilde

YANG Tao, master, vice professor, Foreign Languages Department, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China. GU Yan, master, professor, Foreign Language Department, Xuzhou Kindergarten Teachers College, Xuzhou, China.

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(2010) made more clear statement that the use of cleft sentences is to highlight the main theme. Thus, it can be considered the essence of cleft sentence lies in the role of prominence.

Research Background Domestic and foreign research on cleft sentences focuses on language ontology (Wang & Chen, 2008), including the structure and meaning of cleft sentences. There are also studies about the relationship between cleft sentences and rhythms (Lambrecht, 1995, pragmatics (Hedberg, 1990), sources (Hedberg, 1990), as well as cross-language perspective (Luo, 2009). In addition, some studies are conducted on the differences between English and Chinese syllabic sentences, but mainly the language itself, such as Huang (1996), Luo (2009), and Chou and Zhang (2004). However, there are few studies on English and Chinese cleft sentences from the perspective of learners. Previously, Wang Lifei employed the corpus method to conduct empirical research on the use of cleft sentences in college English writing, but his research focuses on the use of cleft sentences in Chinese and English native speakers from the perspective of the construction of cleft sentences. This paper starts with the form and grammatical functions of the constituent elements of the cleft sentence, especially from Chinese students’ perspective. Furthermore, the application characteristics of various cleft sentences in English majors’ writings are studied respectively and their common features are concluded finally.

Research Design Research Questions This study mainly answers the following questions: 1. What are the general application characteristics of cleft sentences in English writings for Chinese English majors? 2. Compared with native speakers, what are the application characteristics of the three types of cleft sentences used by Chinese students in English writings? Source of Corpus The learner corpus used in this study is WECCL in SWECCL 2.0, which contains the corpus of college English majors from 2003 to 2007 in China. The study selected limited time and non-time-limited essays written by all the juniors and seniors in English majors (313,095 tokens) to establish a sub-corpus, which is still referred to as WECCL. The reason for this selection is that juniors and seniors’ English level is relatively higher and closer to native speakers. Thus, the comparison result more reliably reflects the Chinese students’ unique applied characteristics of cleft sentences rather than the problems caused by language level. The reference corpus is BAWE (The British Academic Written English), which was completed during the period from 2004 till 2007. The corpus is composed of essays written by five grade students from undergraduate to postgraduates at three universities in Britain. And they are all classified into four categories based on the subjects. Among them, the articles of the undergraduate students in the Arts and Humanities are selected in this study since those articles are argumentative texts, consistent with the writing style of WECCL, on which the BAWE sub-corpus (368,303 token) is established, still referred to as BAWE in the following part. Corpus Concordance and Processing Since BAWE is a raw corpus, the sub-corpus built is first coded using CLAWS4 (the same coding system used by WECCL). Then, by writing a regular expression, the corpus retrieval software is used to retrieve the

60 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE USE OF CLEFT SENTENCES eligible sentences in the two corpora. The manual proofreading is performed after obtaining the sub-corpus with the purpose to remove the fake cleft sentences which are selected into the corpus due to the individual syntactic structure conforming to the regular expression.

Results and Discussion Application Features of It-Cleft Sentence Firstly, the overall distribution of the it-cleft sentences is among Chinese students and British students, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Overall Distribution of It-Cleft Sentences Among WECCL and BAWE That Who Which Zero Where When Total WECCL 11 10 2 0 0 0 23 BAWE 36 10 5 1 1 0 53

Then, the comparison of the use of cleft between Chinese students and native speakers was conducted from two perspectives which are the components and grammatical functions of cleft sentences. The results are shown in Table 2:

Table 2 The Composition of Components and Grammatical Functions of Cleft Sentences in WECCL and BAWE Function WECCL BAWE Form S DO IO ADJ GEN Total S DO IO ADJ GEN Total NP 22 1 23 21 6 3 2 32 PP 19 19 ADVP 2 2 VP CLAUSE Total 2 1 23 21 6 3 21 2 53 Notes. S = subject, DO = direct object, IO = indirect object, ADJ = adjunct modifier, GEN = genitive affiliation.

It is not difficult to find out “S” is the most popular used component in it-cleft sentences in the two corpora, but Chinese students hardly use IO, ADJ, and GEN as cleft component in it-cleft sentences, which means Chinese students get used to emphasize the information only by using the subject part in it-cleft sentences. From the perspective of the composition of the components of cleft sentences, the NP is absolutely dominant in the cleft components. Moreover, one obvious difference lies in the fact that Chinese students lack the use of PP and ADVP as cleft components while native speakers regularly use the cleft component of PP, accounting for 34.6%, for example: (1) It was only at Putney that the franchise became the preeminent issue, because the levelers concrete proposals for political, social, and economic reform. Also there are obvious “zero-decoration” tendencies of cleft components, such as: (2) It is knowledge that makes man intellectual. It should be pointed out that there is no negative form in all the it-emphatic sentences used by Chinese students, while there are 19.4% of negative forms in the BAWE, for instance:

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(3) After all it was not war that completely ravaged East Asian states in 1997. Compared with affirmative expressions, the negative form of language belongs to a kind of token, which is more challenging for students whether to learn or to apply. Thus, we are able to predict that it is because Chinese students mentally avoid difficulties when using cleft sentences that they tend to be “zero-decoration” for cleft components and to intentionally or unintentionally avoid using the negative form of cleft sentences. Application Characteristics of Wh-Cleft Sentence The communication function of the wh-cleft sentence is to move the information center to the end of the sentence (Chou & Zhang, 2004). From the perspective of composition, the wh-cleft sentence refers to the copular sentences with wh-clause, often “what” (seldom where, when, why, how, who) being the main components. The overall distribution of wh-cleft sentences is presented in Table 3.

Table 3 General Distribution of Wh-Cleft Sentences in WECCL and BAWE What How Who Whose Where When Why Total WECCL 28 1 29 BAWE 40 4 1 1 46

Then, from the two perspectives of the composition and grammatical function of the cleft component, the comparison involving the use of wh-cleft sentence is conducted between Chinese students and native speakers. The results are shown in Table 4:

Table 4 The Distribution Data of Grammatical Function and Components in Wh-Cleft Sentence Function WECCL BAWE Form S DO IO ADJ GEN Total S DO IO ADJ GEN Total NP 5 4 1 10 13 5 2 20 PP 1 1 ADVP VP 9 9 5 5 CLAUSE 5 2 7 7 9 1 17 Total 10 15 1 26 20 19 3 1 43

It is found from the data that in the both corpora, “what” cleft sentence occupies the main body of all wh-cleft sentences, which is consistent with the research results of Delin (1989) and Collins (1991). However, from the form of cleft components, the form of PP as a cleft component is missing in SWEECL, and the frequency of the cleft sentence with clause as a cleft component is also much lower than that in BAWE. Moreover, from the syntactic function of the cleft component, Chinese students tend to use the wh-cleft sentence with S and DO as the cleft components; but 60% of them are objects composed of verb infinitive. Compared with the inverted wh-cleft sentence, the cleft component in the wh-cleft sentence should be a longer verb phrase and clause (Han & Hedberg, 2006), while the Chinese student’s usage tends to be simplex, especially with the trends of concentration on those several verbs structures, such as what sb. needs to do/know structure, occurring as many as 12 times. This is probably because this structure is highly consistent with the Chinese structure of “subject + suo + verb + de”, which is easy to grasp.

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Furthermore, as far as the complexity of the sentence itself is concerned, Chinese students tend to use the least vocabulary to complete the structure of the cleft sentence. The statistical results show that the average interval between wh- and verbs in BAWE is in average 6.2 words while the average interval of cleft clauses in SWEECL is 3.4 words, which is only half of the number of words of native speakers. Once again, it embodies its tendency to simplify. Application Features of Inverted Wh-Cleft Sentences The overall distribution of inverted wh-cleft sentences is shown in Table 5:

Table 5 Overall Distribution of Inverted Wh-Cleft Between WECCL and BAWE What How Who Whose Where When Why Total WECCL 21 3 3 0 0 1 14 42 BAWE 30 9 1 0 11 13 7 71

Then, from the aspects of the compositions and grammatical functions, the comparison results of cleft sentences used by Chinese students and native speakers are shown in the Table 6.

Table 6 Distribution of Inverted Wh-Cleft in Its Compositions and Grammatical Functions Function S DO IO ADJ GEN Total S DO IO ADJ GEN Total Form NP 10 13 1 16 36 10 14 2 29 55 PP 4 4 ADVP 2 2 VP CLAUSE 2 1 3 4 6 10 Total 0 15 1 17 42 14 14 2 41 71

The data indicate that both WECCL and BAWE mainly use ADJ as cleft components, followed by the direct object and then the subject S in the use of inverted wh-cleft. In addition, Chinese students mainly rely on using “what” as an embedded leading word, making up 50%, while the sentences with “when” as an embedded leading word are very less. It should also be pointed out that in all 14 cases of inverted wh-cleft sentences with “why” as an antecedent, all WECCL use sentence patterns of “this/that is why...”. This again reflects the characteristics of Chinese students tending to be fossilized and simplified in the use of cleft sentences. Overall Characteristics of Cleft Sentences First, the overall distribution of the various cleft sentences in the two corpora is listed in Table 7. The sig. values in Table 7 indicate that the distribution frequency of the three types of cleft sentences in BAWE is higher than that in WECCL. In other words, the overall frequency of use of cleft sentences in Chinese students’ writing is lower than that of native speakers, and there is a significant difference between the two (S = 0.001, < 0.05), mainly due to the fact that the frequency of use of it-cleft is significantly lower than that of native speakers (S = 0.005, < 0.05). As a kind of marker structure of cleft sentence, it is not surprising to find that most foreign language learners avoid using the structure because non-standard means higher complexity and the heavier cognitive load during processing (Andrews, Birney, & Halford, 2006).

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Table 7 Log-Likelihood Check of Occurrence Rate of Cleft Sentences in WECCL and BAWE Freq. in BAWE Freq. in WECCL Log-likelihood Sig. It-cleft 53 23 7.80 0.005** + Wh-cleft 46 29 1.62 0.203 + Inverted wh-cleft 71 42 3.56 0.059 + Total 170 94 10.89 0.001*** +

In addition, the formation mechanism of Chinese cleft sentences is also different from that of English. For the it-clefts, although both use a certain construction as a mark, the English ones must have a nominal subject in addition to the , because the subject-first language requires a sentence to always have a subject. However, in Chinese “is...” is directly added before the focus of the component, without the formal subject, but requires the standard word order of the Chinese sentence like “subject + modifier + verb + object”. Those differences of cleft sentences between Chinese and English are bound to cause difficulties for students in practical application. Although the frequency of use of the wh-cleft sentence and the inverted wh-cleft sentence is lower than that of the native language, it does not constitute a significant difference. Certainly, we also cannot blindly conclude that Chinese students are close to the native speakers in use of wh-cleft sentences and inverted wh-cleft sentences since frequency data only indicate the “quantity” rather than the “quality” considerations. It can be noted that the recurrence of sentence patterns such as “this/that is why... ” or “what sb. needs to do is... ” increases the frequency of use of wh cleft sentences, but its use is fossilized and it is not safe to conclude Chinese English majors have grasped the construction of wh-clefts or inverted wh-clefts. Next, theoretically, any sentence constituents can be emphasized, but in real application of cleft sentence, there exist some differences between Chinese students and native speakers (Quirk & Leech, 1985). For Chinese students, it is very common to take SU as cleft part, and DO is the second choice, which is similar to the native speakers in use order, because it is more difficult to deal with the object-related clauses than the subject-related clauses (Gordon, Hendrick, & Levine, 2002; Warren & Gibson, 2005). However, in WECCL, there are too few sentences divided by IO, only with two cases. This is mainly because in Chinese, all the components after the verb cannot be cut off. As a result, in Chinese, there are no sentences with direct or indirect objects as clefts (Cheng, 1992). That is why Chinese students do not take IO as emphatic part. In addition, the use of PP as a cleft component is seriously inadequate for Chinese students, which is probably caused by Chinese students’ lack of grasp of the cleft ability of the place adverbs. Finally, the distribution of the guide words in the embedded sentence is sorted out. The order of use frequency in BAWE is like this: what > that > how/when > where > why > who > which > whose, while the usage frequency in WECCL is listed as follows: what > that > why > who > when > which. On the one hand, there is not any example of “where” or “whose” as embedded guide words in Chinese students’ essays. The absence of “where” is closely related to the low frequency of PP usage. On the other hand, Chinese students tend to employ a large number of “what” and “that” as the guide words in the embedded sentence due to the fact that grammar teaching in China usually prefers to refer to it-cleft sentences as emphatic sentence instead of “cleft sentences”, and limits its embedded guide words to “that” or “ who”. In this case, it is difficult for students to avoid the narrowness of understanding and use of cleft sentences (Luo, 2009).

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Conclusion All in all, Chinese students and native speakers have both consistency and differences in the use of cleft sentences. In addition to some quantitative features just like overuse or under-use, the use of Chinese students’ English cleft sentences also shows some features like reductionism, parochialism, and avoidance. Therefore, students should pay more attention to variances and diversities in use of cleft sentences, particularly in semantic collocation, grammatical construction, and pragmatic functions (Lu, 2003). Since the qualitative research part of this study is small and this research has not analyzed the causes of the above features, further exploration can be performed in future research.

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