What they highlight is ...: The discourse functions of basic wh-clefts in lectures.

This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic wh-clefts such
as what our brains do is complicated information processing in 160 lectures drawn from the
British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. Like much linguistic research on this
academic genre, the investigation is motivated by the need to gain a better understanding
of language use in lectures to aid effective English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course
design. To this end, the composition of the wh-clauses was analysed for its main constituents
(subjects, verb phrases and modality) and the clefts were grouped according to their
apparent main function and subfunction within the lecture discourse. The results show
that basic wh-clefts mostly serve to highlight aspects of content information and there was
also disciplinary variation in their use. Implications for EAP course design are discussed.