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Definite il y a-clefts in spoken French*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2016

LYAN VERWIMP  and
KAREN LAHOUSSE
LYAN VERWIMP*
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
KAREN LAHOUSSE
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
*
Address for correspondence: KU Leuven – ESAT – PSI, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2441, Leuven 3001, Belgium e-mail: lyan.verwimp@telenet.be
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Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , November 2017 , pp. 263 - 290
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Gaétan de Saint Moulin for his grammaticality judgments.

References

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