Questão 67108

An advanced writing instructor is teaching her students about the pragmatic-discursive function of sentence structure in creating focus and emphasis. She wants to move beyond the simple 'active vs. passive' dichotomy and introduce them to a more nuanced set of syntactic options for 'information packaging'. The topic of the lesson is the use of 'cleft sentences' (it-clefts and wh-clefts) to structure information. She presents her students with three sentences that convey the same basic information:

(1) Standard order: John broke the window with a hammer.
(2) It-cleft: It was John who broke the window with a hammer. (focus on the agent)
(3) Wh-cleft: What John broke with a hammer was the window. (focus on the patient)

Her theoretical basis is from functional grammar, which posits that syntax is a tool for shaping discourse. A key reading states: 'Speakers and writers constantly make choices about how to package information within a sentence. Cleft constructions are a powerful resource for managing the flow of information and guiding the reader's attention. They allow the writer to take one piece of information from a proposition and give it special prominence, marking it as the focus of the assertion, often to contradict or correct an implicit assumption.'

Analyze the following statements about the pragmatic-discursive function of these constructions:

I. The it-cleft in (2) is pragmatically appropriate in a context where the listener might have assumed someone else (e.g., Mary) broke the window. It serves to isolate and focus on the agent, 'John', for contrastive or corrective purposes.
II. The wh-cleft in (3) presupposes that 'John broke something with a hammer' is known information, and its function is to assert what the new, focal information is—'the window', not something else.
III. While sentence (1) is a neutral statement of fact, sentences (2) and (3) are more pragmatically marked and are used to manage the listener's/reader's attention and expectations in a specific discursive context.

Which statement(s) provide a correct analysis of the information packaging function of cleft sentences?