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In:Existential Constructions across Languages: Forms, meanings and functions
Edited by Laure Sarda and Ludovica Lena
[Human Cognitive Processing 76] 2023
► pp. 139–179

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Chapter 5
Presentational clefts, existentials and information structure

A comparative perspective on French and Italian

ORCiD logo with link | Sorbonne Université, Unité de recherche STIH, France
ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven, Belgium
Published online: 5 July 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.76.05car
Abstract
Presentational c’è / il y a clefts in Italian and French have been argued to differ from the existential and locative constructions they derive from by their syntactic, semantic and information-structural properties: they would invariably convey sentence-focus. In the present study, we argue for a unitary treatment of all c’è / il y a constructions, whose meaning is locational-existential, and whose discourse function is to present the nominal argument as non-topical. This analysis de-particularizes presentational clefts with respect to locative and existential c’è / il y a constructions and accounts for the fact that, rather than conveying invariably sentence-focus, they present the same variety of information structure articulations as the non-cleft c’è / il y a constructions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Semantic and pragmatic properties of existential sentences
    • 2.1A semantic approach of the relationships between existence, possession and location
    • 2.2Labeling of categories and relationships between categories: Some problems
    • 2.3Towards a semantic-pragmatic approach of the relationships between existence, possession and location
    • 2.4Towards a more accurate account of information structure
  • 3.Cruschina’s classification of c’è sentences in Italian (Cruschina 2012, 2015, 2018)
    • 3.1Four types of c’è sentences
    • 3.2Again on labels and delimitation of categories
    • 3.3The locative pronoun ci and its relationship with the locative coda
  • 4.Decomposing a hybrid typology
    • 4.1The referential properties of the pronoun ci
    • 4.2The semantic features of location, existence and presentation
    • 4.3The (in)definiteness of the pivot or locatum and the nature of the coda
    • 4.4Information-structural properties of the constructions
  • 5.C’è/il y a sentences and information structure
    • 5.1Sentence-focus
    • 5.2Narrow focus on the pivot
    • 5.3Double contrast
    • 5.4Our proposal: Three information-structural (IS) articulations, one semantic location-existence zone
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
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