Summary

This monograph is the first large-scale corpus study of French il y a clefts. While providing an in-depth analysis of their syntactic, semantic and discourse-functional properties – including a comparison with Italian c’è clefts and with French c’est clefts – it also develops a critical approach to the common definition of clefts. In this sense, it will be of interest to specialists of Romance and non-Romance clefts alike.