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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 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]