Chapter 5. Presentational clefts, existentials and information structure

Abstract

Presentational c’è / il y a clefts in Italian and French have been argued to differ from the existential and locative constructions they derive from by their syntactic, semantic and information-structural properties: they would invariably convey sentence-focus. In the present study, we argue for a unitary treatment of all c’è / il y a constructions, whose meaning is locational-existential, and whose discourse function is to present the nominal argument as non-topical. This analysis de-particularizes presentational clefts with respect to locative and existential c’è / il y a constructions and accounts for the fact that, rather than conveying invariably sentence-focus, they present the same variety of information structure articulations as the non-cleft c’è / il y a constructions.