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In:Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond
Edited by Marco García García and Melanie Uth
[Studies in Language Companion Series 201] 2018
► pp. 255–286

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Chapter 9
Adverbial cleft sentences in Italian, French and English

A comparative perspective

 | University of Basel
 | University of Zurich
Published online: 28 November 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.201.09dec
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to offer a multi-layered analysis of adverbial clefts in Italian, French, and English. In particular, we intend to offer a corpus-based study of the syntactic category of the cleft constituent, its semantic type and, finally, the information structure of adverbial clefts. In the first part of our contribution, after defining the concept of adverbial, we discuss which categories of adverbials can (or cannot) be clefted. In the second part, we cast light on the similarities and differences between the three languages. The main cross-linguistic similarities concern the semantic type of cleft adverbials, whereas the most significant differences lie in information structure. Finally, we will relate our empirical findings to the ongoing theoretical discussion on the semantics (and pragmatics) of adverbial clefts.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Defining (cleftable) adverbials
    • 2.1Adverbials as a syntactic function
    • 2.2Syntactic categories of adverbials
    • 2.3Cleftable adverbials
  • 3.Adverbials in Italian, French and English clefts: Corpus findings
    • 3.1Methods and data
      • 3.1.1Corpus
      • 3.1.2Corpus query
    • 3.2Corpus findings: Italian, French and English
      • 3.2.1Frequency of adverbial clefts
      • 3.2.2Syntactic categories of the cleft constituent in adverbial clefts
      • 3.2.3Semantic categories of the cleft constituent in adverbial clefts
      • 3.2.4Information structure of adverbial clefts
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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