5 The emergence and early development of c’est ‘it is’ clefts in French L1
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Abstract
This article describes the developmental path of c’est ‘it is’ clefts in French, on the basis of a dataset consisting of over 300 clefts from spontaneous and semi-naturalistic corpora of speech production by very young children (ages 1-3). Our data indicate that syntax rapidly develops from adult-like ‘reduced clefts’ to non-adult-like ‘cleft attempts’ and to adult-like ‘full clefts’. Since all these formal types of clefts have adult-like information structure articulations, we conclude that children are sensitive to the discourse pragmatics of this syntactic construction before adult-like syntax is acquired. We also provide some evidence confirming the hypothesis according to which reduced clefts are elided full clefts (Belletti 2013) and the ‘low analysis’ of adult clefts (Haegeman et al. 2013; Belletti 2013).
Abstract
This article describes the developmental path of c’est ‘it is’ clefts in French, on the basis of a dataset consisting of over 300 clefts from spontaneous and semi-naturalistic corpora of speech production by very young children (ages 1-3). Our data indicate that syntax rapidly develops from adult-like ‘reduced clefts’ to non-adult-like ‘cleft attempts’ and to adult-like ‘full clefts’. Since all these formal types of clefts have adult-like information structure articulations, we conclude that children are sensitive to the discourse pragmatics of this syntactic construction before adult-like syntax is acquired. We also provide some evidence confirming the hypothesis according to which reduced clefts are elided full clefts (Belletti 2013) and the ‘low analysis’ of adult clefts (Haegeman et al. 2013; Belletti 2013).
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- It-clefts: State-of-the-art, and some empirical challenges 1
- 1 Cleft wh-questions as biclausal structures 11
- 2 What is it that requires or constrains clefts? (Dis)Favouring factors for clefting in Germanic and Romance 35
- 3 Subject versus object clefts: A fresh perspective on a robust asymmetry 81
- 4 Making the case for distinguishing information structure from specification in English it-clefts 105
- 5 The emergence and early development of c’est ‘it is’ clefts in French L1 135
- 6 Distributed computational models of intervention effects: A study on cleft structures in French 157
- 7 It-cleft constructions in Réunion Creole 181
- 8 (It-)clefts in Palenquero Creole and the specificational copula 217
- 9 A cartographic approach to Chinese V de O clefts 235
- Index 257
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- It-clefts: State-of-the-art, and some empirical challenges 1
- 1 Cleft wh-questions as biclausal structures 11
- 2 What is it that requires or constrains clefts? (Dis)Favouring factors for clefting in Germanic and Romance 35
- 3 Subject versus object clefts: A fresh perspective on a robust asymmetry 81
- 4 Making the case for distinguishing information structure from specification in English it-clefts 105
- 5 The emergence and early development of c’est ‘it is’ clefts in French L1 135
- 6 Distributed computational models of intervention effects: A study on cleft structures in French 157
- 7 It-cleft constructions in Réunion Creole 181
- 8 (It-)clefts in Palenquero Creole and the specificational copula 217
- 9 A cartographic approach to Chinese V de O clefts 235
- Index 257
