É disso que se trata: a functional analysis of cleft sentences with neutral demonstrative pronouns
Focalization. Cleft sentences. Neutral demonstrative pronoun. Functional Linguistics.
In this research, we investigate the use of cleft sentences (CLIV) in Brazilian Portuguese, such as é (d)isso (de) que eu gosto, é (n)isto (em) que acredito and é (d)aquilo (de) que precisamos, in which a neutral demonstrative pronoun (DEMNt) with phoric or deitic function is focused. The main purpose is to analyze functional and formal aspects of the use of these structures, in order to explain and discuss: (i) the semantic type of the most frequent verbal lexemes in these CLIV; (ii) the establishment of the referencing of the focal constituent (FC) DEMNt and (iii) the alternation between the use and non-use of the preposition in the focal constituent as an oblique complement. Our theoretical support is the North American Functional Linguistics and we applied the principles of iconicity and markedness (Givón, 1984, 1990, 1995) and expressiveness (Dubois; Votre, 1994). We also considered contributions from studies of other linguistic perspectives on focalization and cleft sentences (Longhin, 1999; Dik, 1989; Braga, 1989), referencing (Santos; Cavalcante, 2014) and semantic classification of verbs (Borba, 2002; Neves, 2011). This research is qualitative-quantitative in nature, and the data comes from the Portuguese Corpus NOW (News On the Web) and comprises 851 tokens of CLIV in comments and newspaper and magazine articles published online. Our analysis shows that the CLIV give focus to the referent of the focal constituent, and can be used for emphasis, support for the reworking of referents, summary and finalization. In addition, these CLIV predominantly use: (i) verbs of 'state' (Borba, 2002) on the SV of the presupposed part, with the pattern [É DISSO QUE SE TRATA] standing out; (ii) DEMNt 'isso’ (that) in the anaphoric and hybrid resumption of referents; and (iii) preposition in the oblique CF, which is a more recurrent strategy, more marked in givonian terms and less marked expressively.