To Cleave or Not to Cleave: Distributional Frequencies of Cleft Structures in Research Articles, Textbooks, and PhD Dissertations

Although researchers have analyzed the formal, syntactic, and functional behavior of cleft sentences in the English language across various genres, their distributional frequencies have received very little attention in academic research genres. Therefore, drawing on a ۲۰,۳۸۹,۲۹۷-word corpus including ۱,۵۲۱ research articles (RAs), ۱۱۶ PhD dissertations, and ۴۸ textbooks, in applied linguistics, this study followed Biber et al.’s (۱۹۹۹) and Collins’ (۲۰۰۲) models to identify and analyze four major types of cleft structures in our corpus. Using a corpus-based research design, we drew on concordances to extract the target cleft structures. The computer program AntConc was used to identify instances of cleft sentences, and the statistical significance of the findings was evaluated through separate chi-square tests. The results of frequency analysis showed varying degrees of these grammatical structures across the three research genres, with textbooks including the highest number of clefts, followed by dissertations, and RAs. The results promise pedagogical implications for non-native English student writers to familiarize themselves with conventions in academic research genre writing for publication purposes. The findings suggest that academic research genre writing affects the frequency and use of these complex grammatical structures.

Keywords:

Academic Writing , cleft constructions , research articles