On the interpretation and processing of exhaustivity: Evidence of variation in English and French clefts

Second language acquisition of pragmatic inferences: Evidence from the Frenchc'est-cleft

“…Evidence exists that clefts incur higher processing costs compared to canonicals (Birch & Rayner, 1997; Hofmseiter, 2009), which for Drenhaus et al (2011) is due to the extra processing step required to generate the exhaustive inference and associate the clefted element with it. Research on the processing of the exhaustive inference per se is scarce (but see Destruel & Farmer, 2015), but if this argument is correct, the pragmatic derivation of exhaustivity comes at a cost 9 . L2 learners at early stages of proficiency may simply not possess sufficient processing resources to derive the inference.…”

The L2 Acquisition of French Interrogatives: Pragmatic Inferences in Clefted wh-Questions

“…Previous research on the French c'est-cleft has shown that it carries an exhaustive inference. Although present, this inference can be cancelled in declarative clefts when faced with incompatible discourse information (Destruel and DeVeaugh-Geiss 2018), in contrast with the existence presupposition that is much more robust and difficult to remove. Given these observations, we predict that French native speakers will prefer the clefted question with responses that contain an exhaustive mention, but they will not reject clefted questions with non-exhaustive answers as strongly as they rejected the empty set response with clefted questions in Task 1.…”

“…While exhaustivity is conveyed by both English and French declarative clefts (Destruel 2013), Destruel and DeVeaugh-Geiss (2018) found variations in its systematicity across the two languages. Results from a picture-sentence verification task suggested that French speakers were more willing to accept declarative clefts in contexts violating exhaustivity and did so without the processing costs that emerged with English speakers.…”

It's Not What You Expected! The Surprising Nature of Cleft Alternatives in French and English

“…Finally, it is worth noting that there is evidence that in certain languages, clefts or other intuitive contrastive focus constructions do not always lead to the exclusion of alternatives; the strength of the exhaustive inference can in fact be modulated by the context. This has been argued, for instance, for clefts in St'át'imcets (Salish; Thoma, 2009) and French (Destruel and DeVeaugh-Geiss, 2018), for focus movement structures in K'ichee' which are arguably clefts (Mayan; Yasavul, 2013), and for non-cleft focus movement structures in Tangale (Chadic; Zimmermann, 2011) which, Zimmerman argues, still show signs of being contrastive in an important sense. Thus, if we want to retain the idea that clefts (and other focus movement constructions) are inherently contrastive, then these data suggest that defining contrast in terms of exclusion of alternatives may also miss the mark.…”