This article addresses the question of how speakers manage information flow in specificational it-clefts by balancing grammatical and prosodic choices in real time. We examine this in a qualitative and quantitative corpus study of both full and reduced it-clefts extracted from the first London–Lund Corpus (LLC–1), whose prosody we studied combining auditory and instrumental analysis. Our empirical analysis resulted in the following findings about cleft usage in speech. Speakers have considerable freedom to choose what information to make prominent irrespective of the actual discourse-givenness of the constituents. Clefts allow speakers to highlight elements by means of two strategies, syntactic and prosodic, which may reinforce each other or create their own different types of prominence in sequence. It-clefts always have a high first pitch accent, which signals some form of reset of the expectations generated by preceding utterances. The choice of whether or not to produce a cleft relative clause is not purely informationally motivated. Rather, reduced clefts achieve specific unique rhetorical effects. All of this makes clefts a particularly useful device for speakers responding moment by moment to informational needs and shifting communicative goals.

In the process of compiling a new corpus of contemporary spoken British English, the London–Lund Corpus 2, we hit upon a construction used in the conversations recorded that had not previously been dealt with in the literature, namely the reactive what-x construction. Prompted by this discovery, we carried out a detailed analysis of its properties and constraints within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics, namely Construction Grammar, and found that the reactive what-x construction features the interrogative what directly followed by a phrasal or clausal complement x. Moreover, what forms one tone unit with the complement and never carries a nuclear pitch accent. The core meaning is to signal an immediate reaction to something said by another speaker in the preceding turn, and the dialogic functions include questions proper as well as expressions of disagreement. The two contributions of this study are: (i) to provide a definition of the reactive what-x construction and (ii) to propose a crucial theoretical extension of Construction Grammar involving a broadening of the concept of construction to cover not only the lexical–semantic pairing but also prosodic properties and the role of the construction in the interactive dialogic space in speech.

This study reports on a corpus analysis of samples of spoken discourse between a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, with the aim of exploring the statistically significant differences in the use of grammatical categories between the two groups of participants. The key word method extended to a part-of-speech level using the web-based corpus analytical tool, Wmatrix, highlights those linguistic domains which deserve particular attention. Specifically, it reveals the lexical and grammatical categories that occur unusually frequently or unusually infrequently in the English learners’ discourse when compared with the language used by the native speakers of English in the sample. The research findings delineate the pedagogical merit of key domain analysis and thus help to inform English as a foreign language teachers and materials developers in the design of courses emphasising spoken interaction.

The role of connectives in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse has been investigated by testing the effect of the connective ‘but’ in the realization of causal inferences and the integration of adjacent statements. The role of this connective in the realization of causal inferences has been tested through a judgment task. The role of ‘but’ in the integration of the adjacent statements has been tested through a word monitoring task. The presence of the connective resulted in shorter reaction times for the realization of causal inferences in the judgment task, but it did not result in shorter reaction times for the integration of adjacent statements, as measured by the word monitoring task. These results suggest that listeners are able to make use of connectives to help them create and decide on the existence of causal connections, but not to process and recognize the surface form of the second statement of the pair.