Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Karssenberg, Lena
• Lahousse, Karen

Titel

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.