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The aim of the present research is to investigate the development of left and right dislocation in child French through a corpus study of three children until age 2;7 from the corpus of Lyon (Demuth & Tremblay, 2008). We extracted a total of 704 dislocations and analysed their syntactic properties. We show that (i) right dislocations are more frequent than left dislocations and (ii) left dislocations are significantly more complete than right dislocations (fewer omissions of verbs or pronouns). We compare these results to the hypothesis of Freudenthal, Pine, Jones & Gobet (2015, 2016) according to which some properties of child language can be explained by a learning mechanism from the right edge of the sentences from the input. We will show that this hypothesis can explain the general trend found in our data, but it is not sufficient to account for the entire development of dislocation in French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the distributional and information structural (IS) properties of il y a ‘there is’ clefts in comparison with c’est ‘it is’ clefts in French. Il y a clefts, which are prototypically said to be “presentational” or express all-focus, are relatively under-researched with respect to c’est clefts. We present the results of an extensive corpus study of il y a clefts 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 contrastive il y a clefts (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 although c’est and il y a clefts 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 in il y a clefts, genre differences, and the implication of exhaustivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses il y a-clefts in spoken French. In the linguistic literature, only one function of il y a-clefts is widely acknowledged, namely presenting a new event in the discourse. By studying corpus examples in their wider context, we found however that many occurrences do not easily fit in the properties described in the literature. We make a distinction between presentational il y a-clefts, which can be event-presenting or entity-presenting, and specificational enumerative il y a-clefts, which give an example of a class that was implicitly or explicitly evoked in the context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nous montrons dans cet article que les phrases introduites par c'est ainsi que correspondent à deux structures différentes: une vraie clivée avec l'adverbe de manière en focus et un connecteur à sens consécutif, récapitulatif ou illustratif. Nous décrivons le comportement syntaxique et sémantique de c'est ainsi que grâce à une analyse de corpus. Pour rendre compte des emplois connectifs de c'est ainsi que, nous plaidons pour une double hypothèse : d'une part la grammaticalisation, à la fois de l'adverbe ainsi et de la clivée, et d'autre part la lexicalisation de c'est ainsi que. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies three thematic markers (TMs) in informal written French: pour ce qui est de, au niveau (de) and en matière de. We will demonstrate that they have different syntactico-semantic and discourse-functional properties and that the exact function of the TM construction results from the interplay between the inherent properties of the TM and the specific syntactic construction it appears in. We will demonstrate that TMs do not only introduce the aboutness-topics, but that they can also establish the frame in which the main clause holds or functions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents the results of corpus research on the distribution of different functional-pragmatic types of it-clefts and c'est-clefts in English and French adverbial clauses. We distinguish between narrowly contrastive clefts, broadly contrastive clefts (or new information focus clefts) and non-contrastive clefts. We present the results of corpus research showing that, whereas the three types occur in asserted (or peripheral) adverbial clauses (typically causals), only narrowly contrastive clefts occur in non-asserted (or central) adverbial clauses (typically temporals). The distribution of the three functional-pragmatic types of clefts is explained on the basis of the interaction between information structure, epistemic modality and assertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comparative analysis of word order in Spanish, French and Italian. We first consider word order in general, and show that Spanish has all types of word order except SOV (i.e. SVO, VOS, OSV, VSO and OVS), while Italian lacks SOV and VSO, and French lacks SOV, VSO and OVS. Taking a constructional view on grammaticalization and language change, we argue that the different word order patterns can be accounted for in terms of grammaticalization. We provide evidence for a continuum from Spanish → Italian → French, Spanish being the least grammaticalized, and French the most grammaticalized language. In the second part of the article we provide further evidence for our claim by focusing on the distribution of a particular type of word order shared by all three languages, VOS, where the subject is typically narrowly focused. VOS occurs in four discourse contexts in Spanish and Italian, but it is subject to additional restrictions in Italian. In French it appears only in one of the four discourse contexts of Spanish and Italian. Our hypothesis is that this is a case of progressive grammaticalization with respect to the interface between grammatical structure (the VOS word order) and information structure. Independent evidence for our claim comes from the distribution of clefts in Romance, which are a functional variant of VOS. This phenomenon, which developed in Romance as an innovative mechanism used to narrowly focus a constituent, shows the reversed pattern as the one observed for VOS: it is most developed in French, least in Spanish while it is progressing in modern Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper it is argued that, contrary to what is often assumed, embedded adverbial clauses have an information structure articulation independent from that of the main clause. More particularly, it is shown that the specific way in which information structure is expressed in adverbial clauses depends on the possibility vs. impossibility of epistemic qualification in the adverbial clause. The claim is based on new empirical evidence concerning the distribution of a clearly information structure-driven syntactic configuration: verb-subject word order in French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the difference between connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in specificational copular sentences is heavily influenced by semantics and information structure. It shows that anti-connectivity effects with respect to binding disappear when the influence of information structure is neutralized, whereas anti-connectivity effects with respect to scope result from the semantics of specificational sentences. These data lead to the conclusion that anti-connectivity effects cannot be used as evidence against a syntax-based approach to specificational sentences and binding, that the analysis of specificational sentences should include both a syntactic and a semantic device, and that the syntactic analysis of specificational sentences should rely crucially on their information structure. I present and adopt Heycock & Kroch's (2002) analysis for specificational sentences, in which connectivity effects result from the assembling of ground and focus. The fact that connectivity effects are also exhibited by verb-object-subject word order in French and Spanish, which is marked for the ground-focus partition, is presented as an important piece of independent evidence in favor of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has often been claimed that certain verb-subject configurations can convey a specificational meaning, but it has not been previously shown that they can also have the same syntactico-semantic and discourse properties as other types of sentences which mainly have a specificational meaning, such as clefts and pseudoclefts. In this article I examine Verb Object Subject (VOS) word order in Romance, and show that it shares the syntactic and semantic properties of specificational sentences. I also provide a description of the discourse functions of VOS in French, Spanish and Italian, and conclude that these differ significantly in each of the three languages. I argue that such differences follow naturally from the specificational nature of VOS clauses, and reflect the different functional types of specificational sentences attested cross-linguistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we show that the distribution of nominal inversion is not the same in all types of embedded adverbial clauses. We present a new descriptive generalization according to which the appearance of postverbal subjects must necessarily be favoured by the presence of a spatio-temporal topic or an indication of the subject’s focal interpretation in asserted clauses (including concessive and causal clauses), but not in non-asserted clauses (including temporal, comparative and final clauses and embedded clauses beginning with sans que). We argue that the factors which must necessarily be present to license nominal inversion in asserted clauses indicate that the subject is not interpreted as the topic with respect to which the clause is asserted. In non-asserted clauses, the postverbal subject can never be interpreted as the topic with respect to which the clause is asserted, and no additional factors are needed for nominal inversion to be acceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks into the distribution of nominal inversion in non-interrogative main clauses and embedded adverbial clauses in French. Occurrence of nominal inversion; Instances when a nominal inversion is allowed in main clauses; Two principles behind the occurrence of nominal inversion in embedded adverbial clauses; Explanation in the account for nominal inversion in comparative clauses and in main clauses preceded by the comparative adverb of manner ainsi.