It's not what you expected! The surprising nature of cleft alternatives in French and English

While much prior literature on the meaning of clefts—such as the English form “it is X who Z-ed”—concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference (“nobody/nothing other than X Z”), we report on experiments examining the role of the doxastic status of alternatives on the naturalness of c'est-clefts in French and it-clefts in English. Specifically, we study the hypothesis that clefts indicate a conflict with a doxastic commitment held by some discourse participant. Results from naturalness tasks suggest that clefts are improved by a property we term “contrariness” (along the lines of Zimmermann, 2008). This property has a gradient effect on felicity judgments: the more strongly interlocutors appear committed to an apparently false notion, the better it is to repudiate them with a cleft.Published versio

Clefts: Quite the contrary!

Much of the previous literature on English it-clefts – sentences of the form ‘It is X that Z’ – concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference (‘nobody/nothing other than X Z’). This paper concerns the way in which it-clefts signal contrast. We argue that it-clefts signal a type of contrast that does not merely involve a salient antecedent, as on more traditional characterizations of contrast such as those of e.g. Kiss (1998) and Rooth (1992), but also involves a conflict between the speaker’s and the hearer’s beliefs, as under the characterization of contrast given by Zimmermann (2008, 2011), which we term contrariness. Results of a felicity judgment experiment suggest that clefts do have a preference for contrariness, and one which has a gradient effect on felicity judgments: the more strongly interlocutors appear committed to an apparently false notion, the better it is to repudiate them with a cleft.https://4f669968-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/sinnundbedeutung21/proceedings-preprints/Destruel-Beaver-Coppock-SuB2016-FINAL.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cpfzckWBy6psH6QCmbOCeXWS2nlL4bGgHHud2GpjKB1YQolksB00UtYzuvPRANOzWvWgfHdLZ7BP8zDYcT5wYIwr-1dBjw2g0-TC0Bic1ByVfjgj68pPdE9novwXm427ehkZI1E59JmiIvJnBKGxzYpI_AxMcKc-gEQuzu6DHXwJoLtzwm1FzFaHEX1LBq_yFSDgBzZajW2AHEFSiqmz1OVPTICm4zLB30AaHUxrtTBhWI1r0pmmX42IwVk9DtYfp0m6uvrsJLxJuvDhBPe-l3sJmHPcH2qhAtt6wqVMT7b-H6wX08=&attredirects=0Published versio

The development of prosodic focus marking in French

IntroductionFrench is traditionally described as a language favoring syntactic means to mark focus, yet recent research shows that prosody is also used. We examine how French-speaking children use prosody to realize narrow focus and contrastive focus in the absence of syntactic means, compared to adults.MethodWe elicited SVO sentences using a virtual robot-mediated picture-matching task from monolingual French-speaking adults (N = 11), 4- to 5-year-olds (N = 12), and 7- to 8-year-olds (N = 15). These sentences were produced with narrow focus on either the subject or the object and contrastive focus on the object.ResultsLinear mixed-effects logistic regression modeling on duration, mean intensity, mean pitch, and pitch range of the subject and object nouns showed that the 4- to 5-year-olds did not use any of these prosodic cues for focus marking but the 7- to 8-year-olds distinguished narrow focus from non-focus through an increase in duration, mean intensity and to a lesser degree, mean pitch in the object nouns, largely similar to the adults, and tended to use mean pitch for this purpose in the subject nouns, different from the adults, who used duration.DiscussionOur study corroborates previous findings that French-speaking 4- to 5-year-olds do not use prosody for focus. Further, it provides new evidence that 7- to 8-year-olds use prosody to mark narrow focus on the object in a more adult-like manner than narrow focus on the subject, arguably caused by a more dominant role of syntactic means in the subject position in French. Together, these findings show that syntax-dominance can influence both the route and the rate of acquisition of prosodic focus marking

It-clefts are IT (Inquiry Terminating) constructions

We offer a new analysis of the semantics of the English it-cleft, building on recent work on exclusive particles such as "only." The analysis emphasizes the discourse function of clefts – which, we claim, is to terminate a line of inquiry by marking an answer as complete. It accounts for the semantic effects – not previously appreciated – of focus placement within the cleft pivot. It also provides a solution to a previously discussed problem with the projection of exhaustivity from embedded contexts

The French c'est-cleft : empirical studies of its meaning and use

textThis dissertation contributes to a fuller description of the French c'est-cleft by reporting on three empirical studies on its meaning and use, and presenting a unified account of the cleft couched in Stochastic Optimality Theory. The first two studies in this dissertation explore the meaning of the cleft, more specifically the exhaustive meaning. First, the results from a forced-choice task, designed to test the level of exhaustivity of the cleft compared to exclusive sentences and canonical sentences, show that the cleft does not behave like the other two sentence forms. This is taken to indicate that the exhaustivity associated with the cleft is not truth-conditional. Instead, I argue that exhaustivity arises from a pragmatic constraint on the way speakers use language. This argument is supported further in the second study, a corpus study that shows there is no categorical ban on the type of NP that can occur in post-copular position in a cleft. In fact, the cleft interacts felicitously with a number of expressions such as universal quantifiers and additives, which have been claimed to never appear in post-copular position. This corpus study further shows that the primary aspect of the cleft is not to convey exhaustivity, but instead to convey contrast or correction. Finally, the third study, a semi-spontaneous production experiment, helps make precise the situations in which an element is clefted. The results demonstrate that there is a clear asymmetry between the way grammatical subjects or non-subjects are marked: focused subjects are mostly clefted whereas focused non-subjects generally remain in situ. Moreover, the experiment shows that there exists some amount of free variation: subjects can be realized via prosody and non-subjects can be clefted. I conclude my research by proposing that the non-random alternation cleft/canonical is not a categorical phenomenon, but is gradient and explained by a set of constraints on French' syntax, prosody and pragmatics. The cleft is used to provide contrast or a total answer to the question under discussion.Linguistic

Prominence in french dual focus

This paper investigates how French signals prominence in prosody in the post-verbal domain of sentences with two objects or two adjuncts that vary in information status and prosodic length. The information status of particular interest here is dual focus, defined as the presence of two foci in a mono-clausal sentence, but other information states are investigated as well. The controlled production experiment we report on allows for a detailed examination of prosodic prominence. High boundary tones at the end of non-final prosodic phrases are pervasive, as has been documented in many studies before the present one. An important but less documented result is the variation in different prosodic curs, in particular in the number and position of high tones, as well as the particular scaling relationship between them, providing a powerful tool for the expression of (dual) focus. We also report on a perception experiment with our data, showing a clear tendency for French listeners to select the intended context question, recognizing dual focus better than other information states. Overall, this article provides elements of answers as to why French prosody is so difficult to pin down, and why contradictory results and analyses have been proposed for this language

The L2 Acquisition of French Interrogatives: Pragmatic Inferences in Clefted wh-Questions

The present study aims to elaborate on the understanding of the second language (L2) acquisition of French interrogatives by focusing on clefted (subject) wh-questions, structures that are largely absent in prior L2 literature. Our research question addresses how L2 learners of French understand two specific properties associated with these interrogatives: existence and exhaustivity. Using two rating tasks, we examined whether a total of 48 L2 learners converge towards the native norm for these properties, which occur at the syntax-discourse interface and may therefore be vulnerable to incomplete acquisition, following the Interface Hypothesis. Our findings suggest that L2 learners at the intermediate level acquire an understanding of the existential inference before an understanding of exhaustivity

The L2 Acquisition of French Interrogatives: Pragmatic Inferences in Clefted wh-Questions

The present study aims to elaborate on the understanding of the second language (L2) acquisition of French interrogatives by focusing on clefted (subject) wh-questions, structures that are largely absent in prior L2 literature. Our research question addresses how L2 learners of French understand two specific properties associated with these interrogatives: existence and exhaustivity. Using two rating tasks, we examined whether a total of 48 L2 learners converge towards the native norm for these properties, which occur at the syntax-discourse interface and may therefore be vulnerable to incomplete acquisition, following the Interface Hypothesis. Our findings suggest that L2 learners at the intermediate level acquire an understanding of the existential inference before an understanding of exhaustivity