Frasi Scisse in italiano e in francese orale: evidenze dal C-ORAL-ROM

Abstract

The article proposes a list of constructions that in both languages can be defined as “cleft sentences”, and investigates how they are distributed in the Italian and French sections of the corpus of spoken Romance languages C-ORAL-ROM. Comparisons are made at different levels: number of occurrences; syntactic function of the focus element; prosodic structure; distribution in the corpus in relation to the formal/informal and monologue/dialogue parameters. Qualitative observations are then provided, based on a heuristic use of translation of the French examples into Italian. The comparison shows both differences and a significant parallelism between the two languages: the differences are due to well known structural features of Italian and French (different degree of positional freedom for syntactic constituents and prosodic accents); the parallelism can be explained with crosslinguistic features of the construction itself. Amongst the similarities, the higher concentration of clefts in formal and monologue texts is remarkable. This datum, together with low frequency in the Italian corpus (0.3% of all utterances), invites to challenge the common idea that clefts are a typical feature of spoken and informal varieties language.