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Focus marking asymmetries in Colloquial and Standard French: A stochastic optimality-theoretic account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2015

EMILIE DESTRUEL
EMILIE DESTRUEL*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
*
Address for correspondence: Department of French and Italian, University of Iowa, 111 Phillips Hall, Iowa City, Iowa 52245United States e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article investigates the grammatical realization of the notion of focus in Colloquial French and Standard French. Based on two production experiments, the article reveals three findings: (i) focus marking is not as categorical as previously acknowledged, (ii) focus marking asymmetry for subjects vs. non-subjects is only supported in CoF and (iii) there is no strict relationship between focus realization and interpretation in either variety. I develop a stochastic optimality-theory analysis, which explains the canonical-cleft sentence alternation in terms of prosody and expands on past literature by accounting for the variation observed both within and across language variety.

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Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , November 2016 , pp. 299 - 326
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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