Contrastive perspectives on cleft sentences

This study examines the use of cleft sentences in J. K. Rowland’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and the Norwegian and Spanish translations of this novel, finding that clefts are most frequent in the Norwegian translation and least frequent in the Spanish translation, with the English original somewhere in between. The results are consistent with earlier findings that frequency in cleft usage differs considerably across languages which have this structure and that these differences cannot be attributed solely to information-stuctural properties of clefts in the three languages or to differences in structural properties such as word order or intonational flexibility.