The IT-cleft construction : a contrastive study of its discoursal functions in English and Arabic political discourse

Abstract EN

From a systemic perspective, Holliday (1985, p.

59) points out that the syntactic structure of the it-clefts construction in English is realized "by an equative structure of an identifier-identified through the structural formula or the internal predication : it+be+noun phrase / prepositional phrase +a Wh-clause." He (loc.

cit.) also emphasizes the fact that the major function of this construction is to "highlight the theme of the clause" in question.

Compared with English, this study reveals that there is a number of major Arabic it-cleft equivalent constructions, which also function to highlight the theme of the sentence in Holliday's terms.

These constructions involve the insertion of what Traditional Arab Grammarians (TAGs) and Arab Rhetoricians (ARs) call 'the pronoun of separation' (damir l-fast) and the 'pronoun of status (damir sh-sha'n) into the structure of the Arabic sentence.

From a discoursal perspective.

this contrastive study also reveals a number of discoursal functions that the it-cleft construction serves in English and Arabic written political discourse.

Through a contrastive discourse analysis of a number of political texts, dealing with the same topic.

It is found that the it-cleft construction in English and its equivalent structure in Arabic serve the following discoursal functions : (1) highlight the theme / topic of the clause and that of a portion of the text, sum up a portion of the text and direct the attention of the reader to more crucial portions of it, (2) present a piece of information as a fact known to someone other than the reader, with a number of additional sub –functions following from this finding.

(3) free the writer from the rigid word order (WO) of English and, to a lesser extent, that of Arabic, (4) show the writer's attitude towards what s/he is writing about, (5) produce an unambiguous reading of it-clefts sentences as specification ones which provide additional information other than what is being conveyed by a normal SVC (English) or VSC and SP (Subject + Predicate) in Arabic sentences, and (6) demonstrate the involvement of the reader in the text s/he is reading.

Although these discoursal functions proved to be, more-or-less, applicable to the texts of both languages.

There are, however, some subtle differences in the degree of their applicability to either language.