Characteristics of the Use of Cleft Sentences in English Majors’ Compositions

The study reported in this paper is a corpus-based study in which comparisons are made on it-clefts,wh-clefts and reversed wh-clefts in the writings of Chinese college students and those of their British counterparts.It is intended to investigate into the characteristics of the use of cleft sentences in Chinese English majors′ writings and the factors that may possibly contribute to these features.The findings show that similarities and disparities are both found in cleft use between the two groups of writers,and the distinctions should not simply be labeled as "over-use" or "under-use",for features like reductionism,parochialism and avoidance in Chinese students′ use of cleft sentences are also revealed through deeper analysis.