Non-prototypical Clefts in French: A Corpus Analysis of "il y a" Clefts

This monograph is the first large-scale corpus analysis of French il y a clefts. While most research on clefts focusses on the English ‘prototypical’ it-cleft and its equivalents across languages, this study examines the lesser-known il y a clefts – of both presentational-eventive and specificational type – and provides an in-depth analysis of their syntactic, semantic and discourse-functional properties.

In addition to an extensive literature review and a comparison with Italian c’è cleft...