An analysis of Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country as a discourse of hope through cleft sentences

Abstract

This paper is intended to demonstrate that the recurrent use of the marked syntactic structure called a cleft sentence in the novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) has certain communicative implications because it is a structure appropriate to express feelings and to highlight information in climactic situations within this novel. The analysis of cleft sentences in context will point out that they allow the writer to be conscious that he is assuring or denying something in a firm way and that they are also important structures for the textual organization of discourse. The linguistic framework of this paper is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a linguistic school that establishes a clear link between lexico-grammatical choices in the text and the relevant contextual factors surrounding it. Systemic linguistics explores how linguistic choices are related to the meanings that are being expressed.