The information structure of French il y a clefts and c'est clefts
A corpus-based analysis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3989019 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lena Karssenberg (0000-0001-7237-267X, KU Leuven, corresponding author), Karen Lahousse (0000-0003-4023-1439, KU Leuven) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 513-548 |
| Publication date | 2018-06-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ling-2018-0004 |
| OpenAlex | W2935739754 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
| References cited | 32 |
This article investigates the distributional and information structural (IS) properties ofil y a'there is' clefts in comparison withc'est'it is' clefts in French.Il y aclefts, which are prototypically said to be "presentational" or express all-focus, are relatively under-researched with respect toc'estclefts. We present the results of an extensive corpus study ofil y aclefts 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 contrastiveil y aclefts (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 althoughc'estandil y aclefts 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 inil y aclefts, genre differences, and the implication of exhaustivity
Articulation (sociology) · Focus (optics) · Impossibility · Information Structure · Linguistics · Political science · Presentational and representational acting · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
The pragmatics of French (non-)prototypical clefts
Intervention effects in clefts
Les sujets disloqués et non-disloqués chez l’enfant français
The emergence of Information Structure in child speech
Why-questions and focus in Italian
Délimiter le contraste
Two Types of Constructionalization Processes in Spanish and Portuguese Clefted wh -interrogatives
On the interpretation and processing of exhaustivity
Theticity and sentence-focus in Italian
When subjects behave like objects
Categories of C’est -Cleft Constructions
Identifying reference and truth‐values
The semantics of cardinal versus enumerative existential constructions
La construction en avoir SN qui SV (« j’ai ma copine qui habite à Paris »)
The distribution of functional-pragmatic types of clefts in adverbial clauses
Pragmatics and Linguistics
Basic notions of information structure
The linguistic realization of information packaging
Cleft existentials in English
Contrast and intervention at the periphery
Predicational clefts
A constructional approach to clefts
The dimensions of topiccomment
Syntactic constraints on discourse structure
A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions
The linguistic realization of information packaging
Subject canonicality and definiteness effects in Romance there -sentences
Identificational Focus versus Information Focus
The Referential Status of Clefts
A Comparison of Wh-Clefts and it-Clefts in Discourse
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2025 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |