TY - BOOK AU - Karssenberg,Lena TI - Non-prototypical Clefts in French: A Corpus Analysis of “il y a” Clefts T2 - Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie , SN - 9783110583755 U1 - 445 23/ger PY - 2018///] CY - Berlin, Boston PB - De Gruyter KW - French language KW - Clauses KW - Französisch KW - Korpuslinguistik KW - Spaltsatz KW - Wortstellung KW - FOREIGN LANGUAGE STUDY / French KW - bisacsh KW - Clefts KW - Word Order KW - Corpus Analysis KW - French KW - Information Structure N1 - Dissertation; 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; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - 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 UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110586435 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9783110586435 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9783110586435/original ER -