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Definite il y a-clefts in spoken French*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2016
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.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016
Footnotes
We would like to thank Gaétan de Saint Moulin for his grammaticality judgments.
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