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image of Brazilian Portuguese wh-clefts in a multilevel analytic perspective
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Abstract

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the distribution of -clefts – i.e. those having a nominal phrase in the cleft constituent position – in a corpus of TV interviews spoken in Brazilian Portuguese. This language variety has three types of -clefts, dubbed canonical, reversed and extraposed, which are analyzed in three levels: the informational-structural level, regarding the types of focus patterns; the macro-discursive level, on how these constructions distribute into topical-chain segments; and the micro-discursive level, with special attention to the rhetorical relations connecting -clefts to their immediate contexts. Nevertheless, only the two first levels are crucial for assessing their distribution. We put forward that the results may be explained by the features [unexpectedness] and [topicality], distributed hierarchically, since the first one forces a contextual question to become explicit, as canonical -clefts are considered to embed a semi-rhetorical question. The conclusion is that the notion of ‘prominence’ can connect the various results.

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2024-10-10
2025-04-24
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: topical chains ; Wh-clefts ; prominence ; information structure ; rhetorical relations ; Portuguese
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