Cover not available
Part of
When Data Challenges Theory: Unexpected and paradoxical evidence in information structure
Edited by Davide Garassino and Daniel Jacob
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 273] 2022
► pp. 183–202

The curious case of the rare focus movement in French

| Université de Caen Normandie

The existence of the left-periphery accounts for the availability of Hanging Topics, Dislocations, and Focus across languages. However, cross-linguistic persistence does not exclude differential rates of realization. Focus movement seems common in Italian (Bianchi 2013); it is rare in French, and restricted to only some of its varieties. The reason for the low rate of Focus movement in French relates to its competition with clefts. This is accounted for by the language’s prosodic constraints. French demonstrably disfavors pre-verbal stress, which discourages pre-verbal Focus movement, and favors the post-verbal focused phrase of clefts. Structural properties of languages account for the variable currency of cross-linguistically stable configurations.

Keywords: focus movement, French, clefts, prosodic constraints, corpus-driven analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Focus movement configurations: Properties and currency
  • 3.The interpretation of focus movement
  • 4.Conclusive discussion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.273.06lar
References
Abeillé, Anne, Godard, Danièle & Sabio, Frédéric
2008a Two types of NP preposing in French. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on HPSG, Stefan Müller (ed), 306–324. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
2008b Deux constructions à SN antéposé en français. In Actes CMLF 2008, Jacques Durand, Benoît Habert & Bernard Laks (eds), 2361–2376. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Authier, Jean-Marc & Haegeman, Liliane
2018 The syntax of mirative focus fronting: Evidence from French. In Contribution of Romance Languages to Current Linguistic Theory, Deborah L. Arteage (ed), 39–63. Cham: Springer.Google Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina
2013 On focus movement in Italian. In Information Structure and Agreement, María Victoria Camacho Taboada, Ángel Jiménez-Fernández, Javier Martín-González & Mariano Reyes-Tejedor (eds), 193–216. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina, Bocci, Giuliano & Cruschina, Silvio
2016 Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures. Semantics & Pragmatics 9: 1–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, Claire
1996 Trois remarques sur l’ordre des mots dans la langue parlée. Langue française 111: 109–117. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Branca-Rosoff, Sonia, Fleury, Serge, Lefeuvre, Florence & Pires, Matthew
2012 Discours sur la ville. Présentation du Corpus de Français Parlé Parisien des années 2000 (CFPP2000). [URL] (18 June 2021).
Büring, Daniel
2016 (Contrastive) Topic. In The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure, Caroline Féry & Shinichiro Ishihara (eds), 64–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cadiot, Pierre
1978 Où t’as ta femme? Semantikos 2(2–3): 1–20.Google Scholar
Costa, João & Martins, Ana Maria
2011 On focus movement in European Portuguese. Probus 23: 217–245. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio
2009 The syntactic role of discourse-related features. Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics 5: 15–30.Google Scholar
2011 Focalization and word order in Old Italo-Romance. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 10: 95–132. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 Discourse-related Features and Functional Projections. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cesare, Anna-Maria
2017 Cleft constructions. In Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax, Andreas Dufter & Elisabeth Stark (eds), 536–568. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cesare, Anna-Maria, Garassino, Davide, Agar Marco, Rocío, Albom, Ana & Cimmino, Doriana
2016 Sintassi marcata dell’italiano dell’uso medio in prospettiva contrastiva con il francese, lo spagnolo, il tedesco e l’inglese. Uno studio basato sulla scrittura dei quotidiani online. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Destruel, Émilie
2016 Focus marking asymmetries in Colloquial and Standard French: A stochastic optimality-theoretic account. Journal of French Language Studies 26(3): 299–326. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Destruel, Emilie & DeVeaugh Geiss, Joseph P.
2018 On the interpretation and processing of exhaustivity: Evidence of variation in English and French clefts. Journal of Pragmatics 138: 1–16. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Donaldson, Bryan
2012 Syntax and discourse in near‐native French: Clefts and focus. Language learning 62(3): 909–930. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dufter, Andreas
2009 Clefting and discourse organization: Comparing Germanic and Romance. In Focus and Background in Romance Languages, Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds), 83–121. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
É. Kiss, Katalin
1998 Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 74(2): 245–273. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garassino, Davide
2016 Using cleft sentences in Italian and English: A multifactorial analysis. In Current Issues in Italian, Romance and Germanic Non-canonical Word Orders: Syntax – Information Structure – Discourse Organization, Anna-Maria De Cesare & Davide Garassino (eds), 181–204. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
This volume. Translation as a source of pragmatic interference? An empirical investigation of French and Italian cleft sentences. In When Data Challenges Theory. Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence in Information Structure, Davide Garassino & Daniel Jacob eds Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logo
García García, Marco
2018 NP exclamatives and focus. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond, Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds), 229–252. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gast, Volker & Haas, Florian
2011 On the distribution of subject properties in formulaic presentationals of Germanic and Romance: A diachronic-typological approach. In Impersonal constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective, Andrej Malchukov & Anna Siewierska (eds), 127–166. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gundel, Jeannette K.
2008 Contrastive perspectives on cleft sentences. In Languages and Cultures in Contrast and Comparison, María A. Gómez-González, J. Lachlan Mackenzie & Elsa González Alvarez (eds), 69–88. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heidinger, Steffen
2018 Acceptability and frequency in Spanish focus marking. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond, Marco García García & Melanie Uth (eds), 99–128. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hinterhölzl, Roland
2018 Prominence, accent and information structure. Linguistik Online 88: 63–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Horn, Laurence
2013 Focus and exhaustivity revisited. Paper presented at the Annual conference of the German linguistic society (DGfS) 35, University of Potsdam 12–15. March 2013.Google Scholar
Karssenberg, Lena
2018 Non-prototypical Clefts in French. A Corpus Analysis of “il y a” Clefts. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karssenberg, Lena & Lahousse, Karen
2018 The information structure of French il y a clefts and c’est clefts: A corpus-based analysis. Linguistics 56(3): 513–548. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krötsch, Monique
1984 Complémentation verbale, analyse du discours et intonation. Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 94: 272–279.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud
1988 Presentational cleft constructions in spoken French. In Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse, John Haiman & Sandra A. Thompson (eds), 135–179. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1994 Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representation of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Larrivée, Pierre
2015 Ordre des mots de la proposition conjuguée. Fiche Fracov. [URL] (07 April 2021).
Leonetti, Manuel
2017 Basic word order. In Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax, Andreas Dufter & Elisabeth Stark (eds), 887–932. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pohl, Jacques
1984 Documents pour servir à l’étude des phrases du type Les fleurs, j’aime. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 35(1): 36–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prince, Ellen F.
1981 Topicalization, focus-movement, and Yiddish-Movement: A pragmatic differentiation. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 249–264.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi
1997 The structure of the left periphery. In Elements of Grammar, Liliane Haegeman (ed), 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roggia, Carlo Enrico
2008 Frasi scisse in italiano e francese orale: evidenze dal C-ORAL-ROM. Cuadernos de filología italiana 15: 9–29.Google Scholar
Rowlett, Paul
1998 The Grammar of French. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Samek-Lodovici, Vieri
2015 The Interaction of Focus, Givenness, and Prosody. A Study of Italian Clause Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 Contrast, contrastive focus, and focus fronting. UCL Working papers in Linguistics 30: 57–77.Google Scholar
Scappini, Sophie
2014 La construction clivée : focus étroit ou focus large. Fiche Fracov. [URL] (18 June 2021).
Stempel, Wolf-Dieter
1981 L’amour, elle appelle ça, L’amour tu ne connais pas. In Logos semantikos. Studia linguistica in honorem Eugenio Coseriu, 1921–1981. Vol. IV: Grammatik, Christian Rohrer (ed), 351–367. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tanguy, Noalig
2010 Focalisation averbale vs focalisation verbale en français parlé : Le cas des constructions binaires. Discours 6. [URL] (18 June 2021).
Turco, Giuseppina, Dimroth, Christine & Braun, Bettina
2013 Intonational means to mark Verum Focus in German and French. Language and Speech 56(4): 461–491. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wehr, Barbara
2011 La phrase clivée en français: problèmes de description. In Syntaxe, structure informationnelle et organisation du discours dans les langues romanes, Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds), 189–214. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa
2001 The constraint on preverbal subjects in Romance interrogatives: A minimality effect. Subject Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar, Aafke Hulk & Jean-Yves Pollock (eds), 183–204. Oxford: Oxford University.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Garassino, Davide
2022. Translation as a source of pragmatic interference?. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 272 ff. DOI logo
Garassino, Davide & Daniel Jacob
2022. Introduction. When data challenges theory. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo
Lahousse, Karen
2022. Is focus a root phenomenon?. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 148 ff. DOI logo
Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo
2022. Distinguishing psychological Given/New from linguistic Topic/Focus makes things clearer. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 40 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.