The information structure of French il y a clefts and c’est clefts: A corpus-based analysis

Abstract

Abstract 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.

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