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.
CITATION STYLE
Destruel, E., Beaver, D. I., & Coppock, E. (2019). It’s not what you expected! The surprising nature of cleft alternatives in French and english. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(JUN). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01400
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