It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English.

While much prior literature on the meaning of clefts-such as the English form "it is X who Z-ed"-concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference ("nobody/nothing other than X Z"), we report on experiments examining the role of the doxastic status of alternatives on the naturalness of -clefts in French and -clefts in English. Specifically, we study the hypothesis that clefts indicate a conflict with a doxastic commitment held by some discourse participant. Results from naturalness tasks suggest that clefts are improved by a property we term "contrariness" (along the lines of Zimmermann, 2008).

When small words foretell academic success: the case of college admissions essays.

The smallest and most commonly used words in English are pronouns, articles, and other function words. Almost invisible to the reader or writer, function words can reveal ways people think and approach topics. A computerized text analysis of over 50,000 college admissions essays from more than 25,000 entering students found a coherent dimension of language use based on eight standard function word categories.