Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 9 (EISS 9 ... - CSSP - CNRS

continuations chosen after exclusive sentences was significantly different from the distribution
of continuation chosen after c’est-clefts (χ 2 (2) = 311.9, p < .001). Differences between clefts
and canonical sentences are also relevant, although obviously much smaller: (χ 2 (2) = 20.81, p
< .001).
Figure 2. Distribution of continuations by sentence form
I conclude that the predictions made are confirmed by this experiment, and hence, the
assumption that c’est-clefts do not contribute at issue exhaustivity is confirmed. Instead, the
inference is triggered by the not at-issue content of the cleft.
4. Cleft’s usage: producing the c’est-cleft
4.1. Introduction
If one looks at the literature on French focus marking, it is almost conventional to find that
French marks focus via syntactic means. Compared to other Romance languages (Dufter 2009)
or to English, French is often assumed to require special syntactic constructions to mark focus,
and seems to be known as the ‘black sheep’ for not having a flexible prosody. Yet, in the past
ten years, much work has been done on the prosodic markings of information structure in
French, especially the characteristics of the prosodic realization of focus (Beyssade et al, 2011;
Féry 2001; Sun-Ah & Fougeron 2000). But no clear consensus on the interaction of prosody
and syntax is reached. Scholars depart from considerably differing assumptions regarding the
acceptability of a sentence form given a certain context; syntacticians predicting movement of
the presupposed material in a relative clause while most phonologists assume a narrowly
focused XP can be realized via prosody in situ.
4.2. Experiment 2
The semi-spontaneous data analyzed in this section stem from an elicited production task,
which constitutes a replication from Gabriel 2010. 5 The experiment presented here constitutes a
pilot and is currently being conducted on a larger scale. It contributes to the experimental trend
happening in the linguistic field by testing the realization of particular grammatical types of
focus in two different contexts. While the majority of previous French experimental studies use
written material to elicit data, the present experiment is a semi-spontaneous production task
5
Gabriel (2010) conducted a production experiment in two varieties of Argentinian Spanish, which
examined the interaction of syntax and prosody in the marking of narrow focus subjects, objects, and double
objects.
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