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Project

Presentational cleft sentences in French and Italian: a comparative corpus-based analysis.

Cleft sentences are sentences which have a split (cleft) form, but whose meaning corresponds to that of a simple sentence. They fall into two categories, specificational (1) and presentational (2) clefts, which are introduced by different types of presentative items (henceforth PIs).

(1) [Context: - Who is singing?]

F: - C’est Jean qui chante.

I: - È Gianni che canta.

lit. It’s John who is singing.

~ John is singing.

(2) F: Je te laisse, (il) y a / voilà / voici mon chef qui arrive.

I: Ti lascio, c'è / ecco il mio capo che arriva.

lit. I leave you, there is my boss who arrives.

~ Bye now, my boss is coming.

Whereas specificational clefts prototypically identify an entity (John in (1)) with respect to some given piece of information (somebody is singing), the raison d’être of presentational clefts is to signal that the whole sentence contains new information, i.e. to (re)introduce a new entity (the boss in (2)) or a new event (the arrival of the boss in (2)) in the discourse. In comparison with specificational clefts, presentational clefts, some types of which are considered to be typical of spoken language, are underresearched. The goal of this project is (i) to provide a comparative, corpus-based account of the distribution and the formal and discourse-functional properties of presentational clefts in French and Italian and (ii) to explain the differences and similarities between presentational and specificational clefts.

Date:1 Jan 2013 →  31 Dec 2016
Keywords:Italian, French
Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies