A multi-level account of cleft constructions in discourse

Delin, Judy

doi:10.3115/997939.997954

Cited by 22 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Also notice that two additional semantic properties of focus clefts in English, namely their existence presupposition (Delin, 1992;Rooth, 1996) and the frequently observable exhaustiveness effect (Delin and Oberlander, 1995;É . Kiss, 1998), are not necessarily due to the focus status of the cleft constituent.…”

Section: A2mentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Importantly, the syntactic clefting of the (contrastive) focus constituent takes place in addition to regular focus marking by means of the focus pitch accent, without which the cleft constituent would not be interpretable as a focus, contrastive or not; see Delin (1992) for other information-structural functions of clefted constituents in English. Similar facts obtain for regular focus marking and focus clefting in typologically different languages like Gù rù ntù m (West Chadic); see Hartmann and Zimmermann (2009).…”

Section: A2mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Focus marking and focus interpretation

Zimmermann

Onea

2011

Lingua

114

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Section: A2mentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: A2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus marking and focus interpretation

Zimmermann

Onea

2011

Lingua

114

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“…Procedural meaning increases the relevance of any act of ostensive communication by giving specific processing instructions to the addressee and thus by reducing the processing effort needed. Representational meaning, on the other hand, increases the relevance of any act of ostensive communication by adding relevant assumptions (see Blakemore 1987, 1992: 149-151, and references in Sperber and Wilson 1995.…”

Section: A Relevance Theoretical Accountmentioning

confidence: 97%

The relevance of cleft constructions

Jucker¹

1997

Multilingua - Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication

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f-clefts, wh-clefts, reversed wh-clefts and their non-cleft equivalents are truth-conditionally identical. However, their discourse functions vary considerably. In terms of relevance theory zY-clefts and both types of wh-clefts give specific processing instructions to the hearer, i.e., they convey procedural meaning. The highlighted element is presented s foreground Information and the relative clause s background Information, irrespective of whether either chunk of Information is old or new. In non-cleft sentences, the distinction between foreground and background depends on the scope of the sentence focus and is gradual. In the cleft sentences, on the other hand, the syntactic structure distinguishes clearly between foreground and background and it determines the scope of the sentence focus. In this way, cleft constructions help to reduce processing effort and thus add to the relevance of the utterance. This account helps to explain the distribution of ίΥ-clefts, wh-clefts and reversed wh-clefts in different varieties of English, e.g., the fact that ίί-clefts are more frequent than wh-clefts in the written English of the LOB corpus, while wh-clefts are far more frequent than /i-clefts in the spoken English of the London-Lund corpus.

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“…Ainsi, montre que l'emploi d'une clivée en c'est peut permettre d'éviter des ambiguïtés de portée et renforcer la cohérence textuelle. Les mêmes fonctions ont été attribuées aux clivées en it par Delin (1989) et Delin & Oberlander (1995). Cela amène Delin & Oberlander (1995) à la conclusion suivante : « (…) we take clefts, like many other pragmatically marked syntactic constructions, to convey not a single semantic or pragmatic feature but a bundle of such features, acting jointly to determine the discourse functions a sentence type can serve.…”

Section: Introductionunclassified

Il y a toujours un chameau qui tombe. Les multiples fonctions des clivées en il y a

Karssenberg

2018

SHS Web Conf.

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Résumé. Dans cet article, je me propose d'étudier les fonctions des clivées en il y a ('Il y a le chat qui miaule') en contraste avec leurs équivalents canoniques à l'ordre des mots Sujet Verbe ('Le chat miaule'). Contrairement à ce que laissent penser certaines études antérieures, je montrerai que ces clivées ne sont pas uniquement motivées par la focalisation / le marquage de la structure informationnelle. Je présenterai des exemples de corpus de clivées en il y a qui ont des fonctions diverses telles que l'expression de la négation emphatique et le renforcement de la cohérence textuelle, que leurs équivalents canoniques n'ont pas. Autrement dit, quand le locuteur utilise une clivée en il y a plutôt que son équivalent à l'ordre des mots Sujet Verbe, ce choix ne s'explique pas uniquement par la fonction de la focalisation. Ainsi, cette analyse s'inscrit dans une tendance plus générale : des unités linguistiques qui étaient auparavant considérées comme de simples marqueurs de focus s'avèrent de plus en plus souvent multifonctionnelles.Abstract. There's always a camel that falls. The multiple functions of il y a ('there is') clefts. In this article, I investigate the functions of French il y a clefts such as Il y a le chat qui miaule ('The cat is meowing', literally 'There is the cat that is meowing') in contrast with their canonical equivalents with Subject Verb word order (Le chat miaule 'The cat is meowing'). Contrary to previous assumptions, I show that such clefts are not solely motivated by information structure. I will present corpus examples of il y a clefts that have various functions such as the expression of reinforced negation and the enhancement of textual coherence, which their canonical counterparts do not have. Therefore, when a speaker uses an il y a cleft rather than its Subject Verb counterpart, this choice cannot be explained by referring to the focus marking function alone. In this sense, my analysis is in line with a more general tendency: certain linguistic units that used to be considered as simple focus markers turn out to be multifunctional.

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A multi-level account of cleft constructions in discourse

Cited by 22 publications

References 11 publications

Focus marking and focus interpretation

Focus marking and focus interpretation

The relevance of cleft constructions

Il y a toujours un chameau qui tombe. Les multiples fonctions des clivées en il y a

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