Cleft constructions are non-canonical in several regards: they deviate from a minimally complete grammatical structure since they involve lexical material absent from the corresponding non-cleft; they are information packaging devices and are rare across registers. Previous work on clefts has identified various factors influencing the use of clefts, such as formality, topicality, weight, and informativity. Building on these findings, this chapter examines the communicative purpose of evaluating as a further factor by comparing a large corpus of primarily evaluative texts with a control corpus of primarily non-evaluative texts. This investigation reveals that in both corpora most clefts are evaluative. They are thus very closely associated with the situational communicative intention to evaluate (rather than with the primary textual communicative purpose). Consequently, clefts are a (more) canonical syntactic choice when speakers/writers intend to express evaluations and may even be regarded as part of an extended set of overtly evaluative lexico-grammatical stance constructions. The study further shows that the formal and semantic characteristics of clefts, including the presupposition, the ‘known fact’ effect, and the exclusiveness implicature, permit the flexible foregrounding and backgrounding of evaluations, which, in turn, may account for the frequent evaluative use of these constructions.

Chapter 5 of Discourse Syntax (Special Endings) deals with two constructions that place sentence elements in the final, end-focus position. Discussing the extraposition of subject clauses (it-extraposition) and the cleft construction (it-clefting), the chapter shows that both constructions serve the distribution of given before new information in the sentence and the placement of complex material at the end of the sentence (Principle of End-Weight). It also shows that alternative constructions (non-extraposition) as well as discourse types and registers play a role in how these non-canonical constructions are used and that there are differences between speech and writing as well as other discourse types and modes. The chapter also discusses the presentation and visualization of quantitative corpus-linguistic evidence and presents strategies for dealing with absolute, normalized, and proportional frequencies gained from natural language corpora.