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Media type:
E-Book;
Thesis
Title:
Non-prototypical clefts in French
:
a corpus analysis of "il y a" clefts
Contains:
Frontmatter -- -- Acknowledgments -- -- Contents -- -- General introduction -- -- Part I: Delimitation of il y a clefts -- -- 1. Criteria for clefthood in previous studies -- -- 2. Corpora and extraction -- -- 3. Application of criteria to the corpus data -- -- Part II: Distribution, morphosyntactic and semantic properties -- -- 4. Il y a clefts: two semantic types (eventive vs. specificational) -- -- 5. Il n’y a que clefts -- -- Part III: Functions of il y a clefts -- -- 6. The function of avoiding “bad” preverbal subjects -- -- 7. The information structure of il y a clefts -- -- 8. Information structure: c’est clefts vs. il y a clefts -- -- 9. Other pragmatic functions of il y a clefts -- -- Part IV: Italian c’è clefts (vs. French il y a clefts) -- -- 10. Italian c’è clefts (vs. French il y a clefts) -- -- Part V: Il y a clefts: compositionality and status as a construction -- -- 11. The compositionality of il y a clefts -- -- 12. No evidence (yet) for il y a clefts as a construction -- -- General conclusion -- -- Appendix -- -- Bibliography -- -- Index
University thesis:
Dissertation, Universiteit te Leuven, 2017
Footnote:
In English
Description:
This monograph is the first large-scale corpus analysis of French il y a clefts. While most research on clefts focusses on the English ‘prototypical’ it-cleft and its equivalents across languages, this study examines the lesser-known il y a clefts – of both presentational-eventive and specificational type – and provides an in-depth analysis of their syntactic, semantic and discourse-functional properties. In addition to an extensive literature review and a comparison with Italian c’è clefts and with French c’est clefts, the strength of the study lies in the critical approach it develops to the common definition of clefts. Several commonly used criteria for clefts are applied to the corpus data, revealing that these criteria often lead to ambiguous results. The reasons for this ambiguity are explored, thus leading to a better understanding of what constitutes a cleft. In this sense, the analysis will be of interest to specialists of Romance and non-Romance clefts alike.