Journal article
It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English
Frontiers in Psychology, Vol.10, p.1400
06/18/2019
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01400
Abstract
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.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English
- Creators
- Emilie Destruel-Johnson - University of Iowa, French and ItalianDavid I. Beaver - The University of Texas at AustinElizabeth Coppock - Boston University
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Frontiers in Psychology, Vol.10, p.1400
- DOI
- 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01400
- eISSN
- 1664-1078
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media S.A
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2019 Destruel, Beaver and Coppock.
- Grant note
- DOI: 10.13039/100008893, name: University of Iowa
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 06/18/2019
- Academic Unit
- Linguistics; French and Italian
- Record Identifier
- 9983737096602771
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