In this paper we present the results of a pragmatic analysis of French full clefts and monoclausal c'est /il y a utterances (e.g. c'est la femme qui l'a tu & eacute; 'it's the wife who killed him' vs. c'est la femme 'it's the wife' respectively in answer to the question 'who killed him?'), when these structures are used as pragmatic strategies to focalize the subject in spoken French. Unlike full cleft sentences, monoclausal c'est and il y a utterances have received less attention in the literature, especially with regard to focus and its realization in spontaneous speech. Investigating the opposition between full clefts and monoclausal forms as well as the questions that these clefts answer allows us to arrive at a more precise understanding of the discourse functions of these structures and the pragmatic contexts in which they are felicitous. The corpus that is used (sgs, spontaneous spoken French) contains many question -answer pairs due to its interactive setup, thus enabling a clear analysis of the types of Question Under Discussion that the clefts answer. The data show that monoclausal utterances are more likely to answer highly active QUDs, whereas full clefts are more likely to answer less active QUDs. The level of activation is determined in terms of proximity and implicitness of the QUD (immediately -preceding the cleft, further away or implicit), and - when the question is uttered explicitly - modality (wh or yes/no) also plays a role.

In this article we present an overview of current debates in the analysis of cleft sentences. The types of sentences that are often seen as prototypical examples of the cleft category are introduced by it is or a cross-linguistic equivalent; in addition, they have specificational semantics and a focus-background information structure articulation. We argue here that other, less prototypical types of constructions, which have received less attention, also belong to the cleft category: sentences that are introduced by expressions such as there is and you’ve got (and their cross-linguistic equivalents), as well as sentences introduced by it is which do not have specificational semantics and which express other types of information structure articulations (e.g. all-focus or topic-comment). We argue that it is fruitful to analyse these ‘non-prototypical’ clefts in more depth, not only to come to a better understanding about these sentence types in their own right, but also to arrive at insights in the phenomenon of ‘clefts’ in general.

In this article, I investigate the functions of French il y a clefts such as Il y a le chat qui miaule ('The cat is meowing', literally 'There is the cat that is meowing') in contrast with their canonical equivalents with Subject Verb word order (Le chat miaule 'The cat is meowing'). Contrary to previous assumptions, I show that such clefts are not solely motivated by information structure. I will present corpus examples of il y a clefts that have various functions such as the expression of reinforced negation and the enhancement of textual coherence, which their canonical counterparts do not have. Therefore, when a speaker uses an il y a cleft rather than its Subject Verb counterpart, this choice cannot be explained by referring to the focus marking function alone. In this sense, my analysis is in line with a more general tendency: certain linguistic units that used to be considered as simple focus markers turn out to be multifunctional.

Dans cet article, je me propose d’étudier les fonctions des clivées en il y a (‘Il y a le chat qui miaule’) en contraste avec leurs équivalents canoniques à l’ordre des mots Sujet Verbe (‘Le chat miaule’). Contrairement à ce que laissent penser certaines études antérieures, je montrerai que ces clivées ne sont pas uniquement motivées par la focalisation / le marquage de la structure informationnelle. Je présenterai des exemples de corpus de clivées en il y a qui ont des fonctions diverses telles que l’expression de la négation emphatique et le renforcement de la cohérence textuelle, que leurs équivalents canoniques n’ont pas. Autrement dit, quand le locuteur utilise une clivée en il y a plutôt que son équivalent à l’ordre des mots Sujet Verbe, ce choix ne s’explique pas uniquement par la fonction de la focalisation. Ainsi, cette analyse s’inscrit dans une tendance plus générale : des unités linguistiques qui étaient auparavant considérées comme de simples marqueurs de focus s’avèrent de plus en plus souvent multifonctionnelles.

AbstractThis 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.

Cet article est consacre a trois types de clivees en voici/voila (type 1 : voila le chat qui arrive, type 2 : le voila qui arrive, type 3 : voila deux semaines que j’attends). Nous analysons (i) l’alternance entre voici et voila, (ii) la distribution des trois types dans deux corpus, (iii) l’alternance entre le premier et le deuxieme type, et (iv) leurs fonctions discursives. Nous montrons entre autres que voici n’apparait que dans 20% des cas et que l’alternance entre les deux premiers types s’explique par des principes generaux concernant l’accessibilite des referents. De plus, les trois types fonctionnent comme des marqueurs de saillance et le troisieme type peut egalement creer un cadre temporel pour le contexte posterieur.

Résumé Cet article est consacré à trois types de clivées en voici/voilà (type 1 : voilà le chat qui arrive , type 2 : le voilà qui arrive , type 3 : voilà deux semaines que j’attends ). Nous analysons (i) l’alternance entre voici et voilà , (ii) la distribution des trois types dans deux corpus, (iii) l’alternance entre le premier et le deuxième type, et (iv) leurs fonctions discursives. Nous montrons entre autres que voici n’apparaît que dans 20% des cas et que l’alternance entre les deux premiers types s’explique par des principes généraux concernant l’accessibilité des référents. De plus, les trois types fonctionnent comme des marqueurs de saillance et le troisième type peut également créer un cadre temporel pour le contexte postérieur.

This article is about different types of Subject-Verb inversion (nominal, pronominal, and complex inversion) in sentences introduced by ainsi 'so, in this way'. We first make a distinction between four main interpretations: manner adverb ainsi, quotative ainsi, consecutive ainsi (expressing either an intentional or an unintentional consequence), and illustrative ainsi. On the basis of a corpus study, we show that nominal inversion often (but not always) combines with the manner interpretation, whereas the predominant function of ainsi + pronominal/complex inversion is to introduce an example or a consequence of the preceding discourse context. The data also contribute to the debate about the grammaticalization path of ainsi. Firstly, the unintentional consequence interpretation is argued to be a "bridging context" between manner and unintentional consequence. Secondly, given the preponderance of the illustrative interpretation, we argue that this under-researched interpretation be taken up in future diachronic and synchronic analyses of ainsi and its cross-linguistic counterparts.