This article addresses the question of how speakers manage information flow in specificational it-clefts by balancing grammatical and prosodic choices in real time. We examine this in a qualitative and quantitative corpus study of both full and reduced it-clefts extracted from the first London–Lund Corpus (LLC–1), whose prosody we studied combining auditory and instrumental analysis. Our empirical analysis resulted in the following findings about cleft usage in speech. Speakers have considerable freedom to choose what information to make prominent irrespective of the actual discourse-givenness of the constituents. Clefts allow speakers to highlight elements by means of two strategies, syntactic and prosodic, which may reinforce each other or create their own different types of prominence in sequence. It-clefts always have a high first pitch accent, which signals some form of reset of the expectations generated by preceding utterances. The choice of whether or not to produce a cleft relative clause is not purely informationally motivated. Rather, reduced clefts achieve specific unique rhetorical effects. All of this makes clefts a particularly useful device for speakers responding moment by moment to informational needs and shifting communicative goals.

中文翻译：

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通过 it-clefts 中的韵律管理信息流

本文解决了说话者如何在规范中管理信息流的问题它-通过实时平衡语法和韵律选择来分裂。我们在完整和缩减的定性和定量语料库研究中对此进行了检验它-从第一个中提取的裂缝伦敦-隆德语料库（LLC-1），我们结合听觉和乐器分析研究了其韵律。我们的实证分析得出了以下关于语音中裂隙使用的发现。说话者有相当大的自由来选择突出哪些信息，而不管成分的实际话语给定性如何。裂隙允许说话者通过句法和韵律这两种策略来突出元素，这两种策略可以相互加强或按顺序创建自己不同类型的突出。它-clefts 总是有一个高的第一音调重音，这标志着前面话语产生的期望的某种形式的重置。是否产生分离关系从句的选择并非纯粹出于信息动机。相反，减少的裂痕实现了特定的独特修辞效果。所有这些都使得裂隙成为一种特别有用的设备，让演讲者时刻响应信息需求和不断变化的交流目标。