It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Emilie Destruel¹  David I. Beaver²  Elizabeth Coppock³ 

[1] Department of French and Italian, University of Iowa, United States;Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin, United States;Department of Linguistics, Boston University, United States

关键词: English;    French;    clefts;    contrast;    interlocutors' expectations;    existential inference;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01400

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

While much prior literature on the meaning of clefts—such as the English form “it is X who Z-ed”—concentrates on the nature and status of the exhaustivity inference (“nobody/nothing other than X Z”), we report on experiments examining the role of the doxastic status of alternatives on the naturalness of c'est -clefts in French and it -clefts in English. Specifically, we study the hypothesis that clefts indicate a conflict with a doxastic commitment held by some discourse participant. Results from naturalness tasks suggest that clefts are improved by a property we term “contrariness” (along the lines of Zimmermann, 2008 ). This property has a gradient effect on felicity judgments: the more strongly interlocutors appear committed to an apparently false notion, the better it is to repudiate them with a cleft.

【 授权许可】

CC BY