The English It-cleft and the Hungarian Structural Focus

Abstract

This thesis discusses the English It-cleft and the Hungarian structural focus constructions. Both sentence structures are being explained from a linguistic perspective, mentioning several linguistic features, including the two most important ones which they share, which are exhaustive identification and contrast. Furthermore, the thesis also provides a brief description of how these constructions differ from other, very similar ones within the same language. After a thorough description, the thesis discusses the results of a case study. Twenty It-cleft sentences taken from books of English literature are being analysed to see if translators used the structural focus or if they offered a different type of construction after converting the text from one language to the other.