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It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English
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 naturalnes...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6591431/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31275211 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01400 |
Sumario: | 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. |
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