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Article published In:
Non-prototypical clefts
Edited by Lena Karssenberg, Karen Lahousse, Béatrice Lamiroy, Stefania Marzo and Ana Drobnjakovic
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 32] 2018
► pp. 86–120

French adverbial cleft sentences

Empirical and theoretical issues

 | University of Basel
The goal of this contribution is to deepen our knowledge of French cleft sentences through the study of a special category of clefts called adverbial clefts. The issues that we will address concern their form, discourse frequency and boundaries with resembling structures. In order to shed light on these issues, we start by defining the concept of adverbial from a morphosyntactic and functional point of view. We then present a corpus-based description of the categories of adverbials that can be cleaved. Finally, we propose a general semantic principle capable of describing and explaining, in a coherent and unitary way, both the data obtained in our empirical study and found in the form of constructed examples in the existing literature. In addition to explaining why certain adverbials can be cleaved while others cannot, this principle also allows for a distinction to be made between two syntactic realizations of the structure ‘c’est Adv que p’, as well as for a solution to the controversial issue of the status of domain adverbials.
Keywords: cleft sentences, French, adverbials, cleft lookalikes, corpus-based study, semantic features
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Defining the category ‘adverbials’
    • 2.1Morphosyntactic features of adverbials
      • 2.1.1Adverbial as a non-argumental syntactic function
      • 2.1.2Morphosyntactic realization of adverbials
    • 2.2Adverbials: Functional macro-categories
  • 3.Adverbial clefts: A corpus-based description
    • 3.1Characteristics of the data collection and methods used to identify the clefts
    • 3.2Characteristics of adverbial clefts in the corpus of newspapers
      • 3.2.1Distribution of adverbial clefts vs other clefts
      • 3.2.2Semantic categories of cleaved adverbials
  • 4.Cleavable adverbials: From a syntactic to a semantic account
    • 4.1Accounting for the cleavability of adverbials
      • 4.1.1A syntactic account
      • 4.1.2Proposal for a general semantic principle
    • 4.2Adverbial clefts vs adverbial cleft lookalikes
      • 4.2.1The structure ‘c’est Adv que p’ with a monofunctional adverbial
      • 4.2.2The structure ‘c’est Adv que p’ with a polyfunctional adverbial
    • 4.3Solving the problematic status of domain adverbials
      • 4.3.1Domain adverbials: The controversial question of their status
      • 4.3.2Domain adverbials: Cleavability and semantic content
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00017.dec
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De Cesare, Anna-Maria
2022. To be or not to be focus adverbials?. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 203 ff. DOI logo
De Cesare, Anna-Maria, Ana Albom, Doriana Cimmino & Marta Lupica Spagnolo
2020. Domain adverbials in the news. Languages in Contrast 20:1 ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo

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