Demonstrates through an examination of naturally occurring discourse that Wh-Clefts and It-Clefts are not interchangeable; they have highly specialized distributions and functions. (EJS)

In communicating, conversationalists constantly make decisions about their interlocutors' state of knowledge and on the basis of these decisions make lexical, grammatical, and intonational choices about how to manage the "flow" of information. This paper focuses on how such decision making affects choices in relative clause constructions…

Through corpus analysis and experimentation, this article demonstrates that both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness) simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. Argues that heavy and new constituents facilitate the processes of planning and production. (Author/VWL)

Locally free reflexives in British English are analyzed as intensified nonnominative pronouns, subject to a contrastiveness requirement and a requirement that the character referred to be more central than other characters in the set. The extent to which discourse prominence marking can mimic locality marking may explain conversions of intensives…

Proposes the Vocabulary-Management Profile, a tool for discourse analysis. The number of new words introduced in a moving interval of text 35 words long is counted and a curve created by plotting the number of new words in a successive interval at the midpoint of the interval. Analyses of text by George Orwell and James Joyce are presented. (JL)

This article examines the variable absence of the verb in "as far as" constructions, which serve as qualifiers or topic restrictors in English. (46 references) (Author/CK)