This paper gives a detailed analysis of the pragmatic functions of WH-cleft sentence, which is usually considered as containing two components: Given/New or Presupposition/Focus.

An Empirical Study of Chinese Learners' Learnability and Acquisition of Wh-questions

To begin with, it provides a critical review of the important issues concerning the interpretation of wh-phrases in multiple wh-phrases in English, such as pair-list answer, the semantic features of the first wh-phrase (D-linked and referentially dependent), the compatibility of multiple wh-question and the quantification of wh-phrase and universal quantifier, etc.

Research on the part of speech,syntactic status and usage of "shi" in Chinese cleft sentences is far from complete.

This paper is trying to have a study of the syntactic approaches,focusing on the uses and evolvement of "cleft sentence" in order to help the readers master the varieties of the cleft sentence.

From the perspective of the figure-ground theory in cognitive linguistics this article gives an explanation of the cleft sentence in English.