Frenchil y aclefts, existential sentences and the Focus-Marking Hypothesis

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article presents the results of a corpus analysis of the information structure properties ofil y aclefts (e.g.Il y a Claude qui chante‘There is Claude who is singing’ / ‘Claude is singing’). I will show thatil y aclefts and existential sentences introduced byil y acan express the same three information structure articulations. Furthermore, it will be argued thatil y aclefts and existential sentences function as focus markers, and that this hypothesis is further supported by psycholinguistic findings concerning constructions related toil y a.