abstract - KU Leuven

French il y a-clefts and existentials: information structural parallels
Lena Karssenberg, KU Leuven
1. Introduction. Il y a-clefts (1) are usually said to have an all-focus (‘presentational’)
articulation (see Lambrecht 1988/1994/2001/2004; Léard 1992), in which both the
Clefted Element (‘CE’) Sarah and the Cleft Relative Clause (‘CRC’) qui chante are focal.
(1)
All-focus il y a-cleft
A: What’s happening?
B: Il y a Sarah qui chante. ‘Sarah is singing.’ (lit. ‘There’s Sarah who’s singing’)
Il y a-clefts are relatively underresearched with respect to c’est-clefts (but see Lambrecht
1988; Willems & Meulleman 2010; Choi-Jonin & Lagae 1997; Giry-Schneider 1988 a.o.)
and have not yet been analysed on the basis of extensive corpus research.
2. Goal. Contrary to what has been assumed before, I will show that il y a-clefts
instantiate three Information Structure (IS)-articulations: all-focus, focus-background and
contrastive topic-comment. Moreover, I will argue that these three articulations of il y aclefts are on a par with three types of existentials. This will lead to the proposal that il y a
– regardless of whether it introduces an existential or a cleft – always encodes the
instruction for the hearer that, by default, she should not expect the following constituent
to be a topic.
3. IS articulations of il y a-clefts.
The results of extensive corpus research (in formal and informal written and spoken
French: Le Monde, YCCQA, CFFP2000) show that 75% of the il y a-clefts have an allfocus articulation (1), 24% have a focus-background articulation (2) (cf. Davidse
[2000/2014] for similar English there-clefts) and il y a-clefts can even express a topiccomment articulation in which the topic is always contrastive (3) (6 cases in total). To the
best of my knowledge, this last type, which is very similar to a left-dislocation (3’), has
not been observed before.
(2)
Focus-background il y a-cleft
[A: ‘I’m looking for car models that cost less than €10.000, where should I go?’]
B: Bonjour. Il y a la Citroën C1 qui est à moins de 10 000 euros.
B: ‘Hello. There’s the Citroën C1 that costs less than €10.000.
(YCCQA)
(3)
(Contrastive) topic-comment il y a-cleft
[‘And Salman says: “(...) There’s the establishment that hates me. There’s all
those assholes who think I just made publicity with the fatwa.]
Mais il y a le peuple qui, lui, a toujours été formidable avec moi.
‘But there’s the people who, them, have always been fantastic to me.’ (Le Monde)
(3’)
Mais le peuple, lui, a toujours été formidable avec moi.
‘But the PEOPLE have always been fantastic to me.’
(lit. ‘But the people, them, have always been fantastic to me’)
4. Similarities between il y a-clefts and existentials.
Interestingly, the three types of il y a-clefts closely parallel three types of existentials.
Firstly, in both all-focus il y a-clefts and regular existentials (4), the whole sentence has
been claimed to be predicated of a contextually defined stage topic (Erteschik-Shir 2007;
Leonetti 2014; De Cat 2007 a.o.).
(4)
a. Regular existential
stage topic [There is a dog in my garden]FOCUS
(Erteschik-Shir 2007)
b. All-focus il y a-cleft
stage topic [Y a quelqu’un qui sonne à la porte.]FOCUS (based on De Cat 2007)
‘There’s someone ringing at the door.’
A second type of existentials, with a definite pivot (5), has been discussed extensively in
light of the Definiteness Effect (Rando & Napoli 1978; Abbott 1997; Bentley 2014;
Leonetti 2008/forthc; Villalba 2013). These ‘list existentials’ are on a par with focusbackground il y a-clefts (2): in both of them, there is a contextually available topic that
expresses a variable for which the CE/pivot provides a focus value, as shown in (6) (see
also Francez 2007; Furukawa 1996 and Hartmann 2008 for similar analyses).
(5)
List existential
A: - How many people know about this?
B: - There’s me and there’s you. That’s all. (Rando & Napoli 1978:308)
(6) =(5) a. As for [people who know about this]TOPIC, there’s [me and you]FOCUS
=(2) b. As for [cars that cost less than €10.000]TOPIC, there’s [the Citroën c1]FOCUS
[that costs less than €10.000]BACKGROUND
The last type of existential is illustrated in (7), and its pivot is argued to be a contrastive
topic (you, contrasted with people struggling...), with respect to which the following
clause (you have all these...) provides a comment, as shown by the paraphrase in (7’).
(7)
Existential with contrastive topic
She said there were people struggling for their lives and then there's you -- you
have all these opportunities and you're throwing it all away. (www)
(7’)
There are people struggling for their lives, but as for you, you have all these
opportunities...
The obligatory contrastivity of these topics is the result of pragmatic accommodation by
the speaker: il y a is by default followed by a focus constituent (as witnessed by the
quantitative data), and therefore the marked appearance of a topic behind il y a needs
some extra motivation. Contrastivity is in this case the licensing factor for the use of a
marked expression (the same holds for contrastive sentence-initial bare plurals in Italian
[Leonetti 2013] and contrastive pronouns in Catalan existentials [Villalba forthc.]).
5. Il y a-clefts and existentials encode the same instruction.
Given that (i) both il y a-clefts and existentials instantiate the same three IS articulations,
and that (ii) the contrastive topic-comment articulation is very infrequent (presumably
also in the case of existentials), I propose that il y a signals to the hearer that what is to
follow is by default a focus – regardless of whether it introduces a cleft or an existential.
In the rare case that the CE/pivot is a topic, the hearer infers that it must be contrastive.
This processing instruction presumably saves the hearer time w.r.t. canonical subject verb
sentences without il y a, because the hearer can block the expectation of a regular topiccomment articulation. In other words, by overtly announcing the information structural
status of the following constituent, il y a is argued to facilitate processing.
Selected References. Lambrecht, Knud. 1988. Presentational cleft constructions in
spoken French. Clause combining in grammar and discourse, 135–179. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.