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The information structure of French il y a clefts and c’est clefts: A corpus-based analysis
Ist Teil von
Linguistics, 2018-06, Vol.56 (3), p.513-548
Ort / Verlag
Berlin: De Gruyter
Erscheinungsjahr
2018
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
This article investigates the distributional and information structural (IS) properties of
‘there is’ clefts in comparison with
‘it is’ clefts in French.
clefts, which are prototypically said to be “presentational” or express all-focus, are relatively under-researched with respect to
clefts. We present the results of an extensive corpus study of
clefts in three different registers, revealing that these clefts most often express an all-focus articulation, but also quite often express a focus-background articulation, which has not been acknowledged often in the linguistic literature. Moreover, the corpora contain contrastive
clefts (displaying properties of both all-focus and topic-comment sentences), which to our knowledge have not been noticed before. It follows from these data that although
and
clefts can both express all-focus and focus-background, they clearly differ with respect to the topic-comment articulation and have specialized for different functions. Finally, several syntactic and pragmatic factors are presented that may account for the (distributive) differences between the two cleft types, e.g., the impossibility of non-(pro)nominal clefted elements in
clefts, genre differences, and the implication of exhaustivity.