French il y a clefts, existential sentences and the Focus-Marking Hypothesis

This article presents the results of a corpus analysis of the information structure properties of il y a clefts (e.g. Il y a Claude qui chante ‘There is Claude who is singing’ / ‘Claude is singing’). I will show that il y a clefts and existential sentences introduced by il y a can express the same t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of French language studies Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 405 - 430
Main Author KARSSENBERG, LENA
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.11.2017
Subjects
Cleft constructions
Corpus analysis
Focus
French language
Hypotheses
Information structure
Psycholinguistics
Sentences
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ISSN0959-2695
1474-0079
DOI10.1017/S0959269516000296

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Summary:This article presents the results of a corpus analysis of the information structure properties of il y a clefts (e.g. Il y a Claude qui chante ‘There is Claude who is singing’ / ‘Claude is singing’). I will show that il y a clefts and existential sentences introduced by il y a can express the same three information structure articulations. Furthermore, it will be argued that il y a clefts and existential sentences function as focus markers, and that this hypothesis is further supported by psycholinguistic findings concerning constructions related to il y a.
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ISSN:0959-2695
1474-0079
DOI:10.1017/S0959269516000296