On explaining the rise of c'est -clefts in French
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Andreas Dufter
Abstract
In Contemporary French, c’est-clefts are claimed to occur with significantly higher frequency than their counterparts in other Romance languages and in older stages of French. Starting out from the assumption that c’est-clefts exist in order to mark focus on the clefted constituent, historical linguists commonly seek to explain the observed increase from Old to Modern French as resulting from the decline of alternative focusing strategies. In particular, the loss of flexible focus accents and the severe restrictions on non-canonical constituent orders are generally held responsible for the rise of clefting. This contribution puts standard explanations to the test of corpora and argues that they fail to account for a number of observations. Finally, it proposes that a more comprehensive account of the evolution of c’est-clefts needs to take into account not only phonological and syntactic change, but also an independent pragmatic innovation, viz. the emergence of the informative-presupposition cleft type as defined by Prince (1978).
Abstract
In Contemporary French, c’est-clefts are claimed to occur with significantly higher frequency than their counterparts in other Romance languages and in older stages of French. Starting out from the assumption that c’est-clefts exist in order to mark focus on the clefted constituent, historical linguists commonly seek to explain the observed increase from Old to Modern French as resulting from the decline of alternative focusing strategies. In particular, the loss of flexible focus accents and the severe restrictions on non-canonical constituent orders are generally held responsible for the rise of clefting. This contribution puts standard explanations to the test of corpora and argues that they fail to account for a number of observations. Finally, it proposes that a more comprehensive account of the evolution of c’est-clefts needs to take into account not only phonological and syntactic change, but also an independent pragmatic innovation, viz. the emergence of the informative-presupposition cleft type as defined by Prince (1978).
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Syntactic change from within and from without syntax: A usage-based analysis 13
- On explaining the rise of c'est -clefts in French 31
- The role of the plural system in Romance 57
- Morphological developments affecting syntactic change 85
- Grammaticalisation within the IP-domain 107
- Imperfect systems and diachronic change 127
- From temporal to modal: Divergent fates of the Latin synthetic pluperfect in Spanish and Portuguese 147
- Non-lexical core-arguments in Basque, Romance and German: How (and why) Spanish syntax is shifting towards clausal headmarking and morphological cross-reference 181
- Towards a comprehensive view of language change: Three recent evolutionary approaches 215
- Subject Index 251
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Syntactic change from within and from without syntax: A usage-based analysis 13
- On explaining the rise of c'est -clefts in French 31
- The role of the plural system in Romance 57
- Morphological developments affecting syntactic change 85
- Grammaticalisation within the IP-domain 107
- Imperfect systems and diachronic change 127
- From temporal to modal: Divergent fates of the Latin synthetic pluperfect in Spanish and Portuguese 147
- Non-lexical core-arguments in Basque, Romance and German: How (and why) Spanish syntax is shifting towards clausal headmarking and morphological cross-reference 181
- Towards a comprehensive view of language change: Three recent evolutionary approaches 215
- Subject Index 251
