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Focus marking asymmetries in Colloquial and Standard French: A stochastic optimality-theoretic account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2015

EMILIE DESTRUEL
EMILIE DESTRUEL*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
*
Address for correspondence: Department of French and Italian, University of Iowa, 111 Phillips Hall, Iowa City, Iowa 52245United States e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article investigates the grammatical realization of the notion of focus in Colloquial French and Standard French. Based on two production experiments, the article reveals three findings: (i) focus marking is not as categorical as previously acknowledged, (ii) focus marking asymmetry for subjects vs. non-subjects is only supported in CoF and (iii) there is no strict relationship between focus realization and interpretation in either variety. I develop a stochastic optimality-theory analysis, which explains the canonical-cleft sentence alternation in terms of prosody and expands on past literature by accounting for the variation observed both within and across language variety.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , November 2016 , pp. 299 - 326
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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