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Characteristics of the Use of Cleft Sentences in English Majors’ Compositions
YANG Tao, GU Yan
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DOI:10.17265/1539-8072/2020.02.002
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China; 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.
cleft sentence, English writings, corpus
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