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'Its Appeal is to the Middlebrow'
A Study in Text Strategy

By Bertil Sundby
September 2001
Almqvist & Wiskell International
ISBN: 91-22-01925-1
56 pages
$44.00 paper original


The starting point of this study is the construction used in a sentence like "His complaint was of a sense of unreality," in which the subject head noun is etymologically related to a verb. (Instead of, say, "He complained of a sense of unreality," or "What he complained of was a sense of unreality.")The question arises to what extent the structure of the 'deverbal' sentence in its particular context blocks the alternative use of the three 'verbal' ones (non-clefts, it-clefts, wh-clefts) or restricts the choice between them. Contents include: Introduction. The deverbal sentence: a comparative study. Survey of constraints. Concluding discussion. References.

Linguistics
Scripta Minora 1999-2000:2