There's more to Italian c'è clefts than expressing all-focus

This paper investigates the information structural and discursive properties of Italian c’è ‘there is’ clefts (C’è il gatto che ha fame, ‘There’s the cat that is hungry’). We argue by means of a qualitative corpus analysis that c’è clefts are more versatile than previously assumed: not only are c’è clefts able to express several information structure articulations other than the prototypical all-focus articulation (focus-background, double contrast, contrastive topic-comment), we also question the widespread assumption that clefts are exclusively motivated by the expression of information structure by showing that c’è clefts can have other motivations too. These motivations include (i) signalling that a singular indefinite NP has plural reference, (ii) the expression of reinforced negation, (iii) increasing textual coherence. Furthermore, we show that the few topical NPs that c’è introduces simultaneously have topical and focal properties. Thus, the data support our hypothesis that c’è clefts function as processing cues preventing a regular topic-comment construal.status: publishe