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Project

Ya les oiseaux qui chantent. A corpus analysis of French il y a clefts

The main goal of this research project is to gain a deeper insight into the syntactic, semantic and discourse-functional characteristics of cleft sentences. The study departs from a thorough corpus analysis of French il y a ‘there is’ clefts (1). The main findings are then compared with a small-scale corpus of Italian c’è ‘there is’ clefts (2).

(1) Il y a les oiseaux qui chantent.

      ‘The birds are singing’ (Lit. ‘There’s the birds that are singing’)

(2) C’è il gatto che miagola.

      ‘The cat is meowing’ (Lit. ‘There’s the cat that’s meowing’)

 

The following main results were obtained.

Methodological relevance: The criteria to distinguish between il y a clefts and cleft lookalikes that are presented in previous analyses cannot always be applied without problems. I explain the source of those problems and argue that il y a clefts can be considered as a gradient rather than a discrete phenomenon.

Distribution: There is a clear difference in distribution of il y a clefts in different registers of French (formal written, informal written, spoken): il y a clefts are much more frequent in spoken French. I explain this outcome in terms of different degrees of processing pressures.

Morpho-syntactic & semantic properties: The majority of previous analyses only consider semantically ‘eventive’ il y a clefts. I show that the corpus data contain a non-negligible number of semantically ‘specificational’ il y a clefts. Moreover, these two semantic subtypes of il y a clefts are shown to have different morpho-syntactic properties.

Functional motivations: As hypothesized, il y a clefts hardly ever introduce topical constituents. The few topics in the corpus are highly marked. Therefore, I hypothesize that ‘il y a’ functions as a processing cue that announces a non-topical constituent. I argue that this function is not due to the whole cleft format (as is sometimes claimed), but to the expression ‘il y a’ only. I also compare the information structure properties of il y a clefts and c’est clefts, showing that the two have the same potential, but a very different distribution of the different interpretations, due to a variety of factors. Moreover, contrary to standard assumptions, clefts are not solely motivated by information structure; I show that il y a clefts also have other pragmatic motivations.

Comparison between il y a clefts and Italian c’è ‘there is’ clefts: Italian c’è clefts turn out to be very similar to il y a clefts in terms of (i) delimitation problems and (ii) functional motivations. I argue that this is due to the availability of the same building blocks in both languages (an existential main clause and a predicative relative clause) and the existence of similar processing pressures (e.g. avoiding sentence-initial indefinites in preverbal subject position).

Compositionality: Contra Lambrecht (1986/2001), I present evidence in favor of a compositional account of il y a clefts. In other words, the main properties of il y a clefts can be derived from their subcomponents; there is no need to postulate a special construction type that is more than the sum of its parts.

Date:1 Oct 2013 →  23 Sep 2017
Keywords:linguistics, clefts, information structure, Italian, French
Disciplines:Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies
Project type:PhD project