What are clefts good for? Some consequences for comprehension

• Published in: Journal of memory and language 1986-08, Vol.25 (4), p.419-430
• Main Authors: Hupet, Michel, Tilmant, Brigitte
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Language; Production and perception of spoken language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology
• ISSN: 0749-596X; 1096-0821
• DOI: 10.1016/0749-596X(86)90035-5

Contextual factors influencing the acceptability and understanding of cleft and corresponding uncleft sentences were investigated in four experiments. Experiments 1 to 3 used a sentence-choice paradigm within short dialogs between two interlocutors. Experiment 1 showed that the cleft construction was highly preferred over the corresponding uncleft in contexts where the speaker's utterance was to provide new information which was incompatible with the addressee's belief; on the contrary, in contexts where there was no incompatibility between the interlocutors' positions, the standard uncleft formulation was preferred. Experiment 2 showed that, in the belief-change contexts, unclefts preceded by an interjected No were preferred to unclefts not preceded by an interjected No. Experiment 3, however, contradicted the idea of a functional equivalence between clefts and unclefts preceded by an interjected No. Experiments 1 to 3 actually indicate that clefts do something that the unclefts do not, be they preceded or not by an interjected No, when contrastive information has to be conveyed. Using a simple comprehension time paradigm, Experiment 4 found that contextually appropriate formulations were understood faster than contextually inappropriate ones; cleft sentences, in particular, were understood faster than the corresponding unclefts when used for conveying contrastive information. These effects were analyzed in reference to H. H. Clark and S. E. Haviland's (in R. O. Freedle (Ed.), Discourse Production and Comprehension (Vol. 1), Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1977) sketch of the Given-New Comprehension strategy applied to denials.