Cover not available

Article published In: Compiling and analysing the Spoken British National Corpus 2014
Edited by Tony McEnery, Robbie Love and Vaclav Brezina
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:3] 2017
► pp. 429–455

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Sociolinguistic variation at the grammatical/discourse level

Demonstrative clefts in spoken British English

 | University of Waikato
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.3.06cal
Abstract
This paper brings together the study of sociolinguistic variation and the area of grammatical analysis by investigating demonstrative cleft constructions in spoken British English such as That’s what I wanted to talk about and This is where I saw him. Using the Spoken BNC2014S, I ask whether speaker characteristics, including gender, age, education and occupation, might be correlated with the use of demonstrative clefts and with various aspects of their structure (preference for the distal or proximal demonstrative pronoun, use of negative polarity, and use of stance adverbs). Findings suggest that in British English, demonstrative cleft use is more likely to be present in the speech of male compared to female speakers, working adults in higher-skilled occupations compared to semi-skilled adults, and in adults of middle age compared to younger adults. This work shows that even highly abstract grammatical constructions can be sensitive to speaker preferences and linguistic communicative style.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sociolinguistic variation within grammar
  • 3.Demonstrative clefts
  • 4.Data and methods
  • 5.Demonstrative clefts in spoken British English
    • 5.1All demonstrative clefts
    • 5.2 What-demonstrative clefts
      • 5.2.1 This-demonstrative clefts and that-demonstrative clefts
      • 5.2.2Negative and positive what-demonstrative clefts
      • 5.2.3Stance adverbs and what-demonstrative clefts
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (46)
References
Ball, C. (1977). Th-Clefts. Pennsylvania Review of Linguistics, 21, 57–69.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barbieri, F. (2008). Patterns of age‐based linguistic variation in American English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(1), 58–88. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barlow, M. (2013). Individual differences and usage-based grammar. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(4), 443–478. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Beaugrande, R., & Dressler, W. U. (1999). Introducción a la Lingüística del Texto. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., Stig, J., Geoffrey, L., Susan, C., Edward, F., & Quirk, R. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Boston: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Calude, A. (2008). Demonstrative clefts and double cleft constructions in spontaneous spoken English. Studia Linguistica, 62(1), 78–118. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2009a). Formulaic tendencies of demonstrative clefts in spoken English. In R. Corrigan, E. A. Moravcsik, H. Quali & K. M. Wheatley (Eds.), Formulaic Language (pp. 55–76). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2009b). Cleft Constructions in Spoken English. Berlin: VDM Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cheshire, J. (1999). Taming the vernacular: Some repercussions for the study of syntatic variation and spoken grammar. Cuadernos de Filologia Inglesa, 81 (Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed July 2017).
(2005). Syntactic variation and beyond: Gender and social class variation in the use of discourse-new markers. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(4), 479–508. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cheshire, J., & Fox, S. (2009). Was/were variation: A perspective from London. Language Variation and Change, 21(1), 1–38. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cheshire, J., Paul, K., Fox, S., & Torgersen, E. (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 15(2), 151–96. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2015). Cleft and Pseudo-Cleft Constructions in English (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Geeraerts, D., & Kristiansen, G. (2014). Cognitive linguistics and language variation. In J. Littlemore & J. Taylor (Eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 202–217). London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K., McIntosh, A., & Strevens, P. (1968). The users and uses of language. In J. Fishman (Ed.), Readings in the Sociology of Language (pp. 139–169). The Hague: Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hedberg, N. (2000). The referential status of clefts. Language, 76(4), 891–920. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. London: Psychology Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lambrecht, K. (2001). A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics, 39(3), 463–516. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lavandera, B. R. (1978). Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop? Language in Society, 7(2), 171–82. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V., & McEnery, T. (this issue). The Spoken BNC2014: Designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2002). Extremely interesting, Very interesting, or only quite interesting? Adverbs and social class. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 6(3), 398–417. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mair, C. (2013). Writing the corpus-based history of spoken English: The elusive past of a cleft construction. Language and Computers, 771, 11–29.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mair, C., & Winkle, C. (2012). Change from to-infinitive to bare infinitive in specificational cleft sentences. In M. Hundt & U. Gut (Eds.), Mapping Unity and Diversity World-wide: Corpus-based Studies of New Englishes (pp. 243–262). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meyerhoff, M. (2006). Syntactic variation. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language Linguistics (pp. 402–404). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2013). Syntactic variation and change: The variationist framework and language contact. In I. Léglise & C. Chamoreau (Eds.), The Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings (pp. 23–51). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Miller, J. (1996). Clefts, particles and word order in languages of Europe. Language Sciences, 18(1), 111–125. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Miller, J., & Weinert, R. (1998). Spontaneous Spoken Language: Syntax and Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2013). The English It-Cleft: A Constructional Account and a Diachronic Investigation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pavesi, M. (2016). Formulaicity in and across film dialogue: Clefts as translational routines. Across Languages and Cultures, 17(1), 99–121. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. (201). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing [Computer software]. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Romaine, S. (1984). On the problem of syntactic variation and pragmatic meaning in sociolinguistic theory. Folia Linguistica, 18(3–4), 409–438.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sankoff, G., & Wagner, S. E. (2006). Age-grading in retrograde movement: The inflected future in Montréal French. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 12(2), 16. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed July 2017).
Serrano, M. J., & Oliva, M. A. A. (2011). Syntactic variation and communicative style. Language Sciences, 33(1), 138–153. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Squires, L. (2013). It don’t go both ways: Limited bidirectionality in sociolinguistic perception. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(2), 200–237. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S., Smith, J., & Lawrence, H. (2005). No taming the vernacular! Insights from the relatives in Northern Britain. Language Variation and Change, 17(1), 75–112. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Trotta, J. (2000). Wh-Clauses in English: Aspects of Theory and Description. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weiner, E. J., & Labov, W. (1983). Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics, 19(1), 29–58. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weinert, R., & Miller, J. (1996). Cleft constructions in spoken language. Journal of Pragmatics, 25(2), 173–206. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wickham, H. (2009). ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. New York: Springer Science. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Miller, Jim & Andreea S. Calude
2020. Speaking and Writing English. In The Handbook of English Linguistics, ► pp. 547 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue