Theme and Information structure in French and English : a contrastive study of journalistic clefts

Shirley Carter-Thomas (1, 2)

1 IMT-BS - LSH - Département Langues et Sciences Humaines
2 Lattice - Lattice - Langues, Textes, Traitements informatiques, Cognition - UMR 8094

In this article I will discuss factors motivating the use of the French c'est cleft structure, a marked-word order structure encountered with greater frequency in French discourse than the comparable it-cleft in English. Previous studies dealing with the English it-cleft, or predicated theme as it is usually termed in systemic linguistics, have generally sought to account for the structure in terms of contrastivness or specification, with the clefted element providing a certain thematic prominence. With the aid of a small contextualised written corpus from the French daily ‘Le Monde', I will discuss whether such considerations can also be applied to the French c'est-cleft. The syntactic and semantic properties of the French structure will be examined as will its pragmatic functioning

Mots clés: Contrastive linguistics; Clefts; Information structure

Domaines: Linguistique

Shirley Carter-Thomas. Theme and Information structure in French and English : a contrastive study of journalistic clefts. 14th Euro-International Functional Systemic Workshop, Jul 2002, Lisbon, Portugal. ⟨halshs-00403689⟩