(University of Calgary, 1979-05) Jehn, Richard Douglas
The grammar of focus phenomena in English has come under intensive investigation in recent years and this research has provided much in the way of explanation for structures which had previously been little understood, e.g. cleft constructions, topicalization, etc. There is, however, at least one type of focus construction which seems to pattern like pseudo-cleft sentences, but which has been neglected in the literature. This paper outlines the most apparent aspects of the syntactic and semantic behaviour of the construction in question and presents a tentative proposal
for its incorporation into the grammar of English following the framework of the revised extended standard theory (Chomsky 1975, 1977a; Chomsky and Lasnik 1977).