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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2015

Corsican Equivalents of IT-cleft Sentences in English: an Overview

Résumé

Pierre-Don Giancarli Université de Poitiers, FoReLLis This brief paper aims at providing a comparison between it-cleft sentences in English, or clefts for short, and their equivalents in Corsican, a Romance language with a pre-Romance substratum spoken in Corsica and northern Sardinia whose grammar has received relatively little attention, a fortiori in contrastive linguistics 1. This article is structured as follows: in section 1 the corpus is introduced, Section 2 presents the syntactic pattern of a cleft in English and the additional necessary conditions to be met, Section 3 is devoted to the two major translation devices implemented in Corsican and the division of labour between them, including their respective subtypes. A cleft sentence consists in the rephrasing of a single relation 2 with a view to partitioning the information content 3 between comment and topic, or topic and comment, and makes this organization visible through syntax 4. The first part of a cleft or predicative phrase contains at least the copula BE 5 and the postcopular clefted element, the remaining part is a clause-like element introduced by a subordinator, which can either be a relative pronoun or a complementizer (see 2. below), including the instanciation of the place with a zero subordinator in English. 1. The corpus There is an obvious scarcity of data available in both English and in Corsican, and to the best of my knowledge there are no original English texts that were directly translated into Corsican 6 and the Corsican translations available were all made from French texts. Yet with either French or English being the source language, we have French fiction texts with both an English version and a Corsican version at our disposal, which amounts to 365.000 words. The texts I drew upon and the abbreviations thereof are presented in the Corpus section after the References.

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Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-02536223 , version 1 (08-04-2020)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02536223 , version 1

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Pierre-Don Giancarli. Corsican Equivalents of IT-cleft Sentences in English: an Overview. Lenguas, lenguaje y lingüística. Contribuciones desde la Lingüística General, May 2014, Pampelune, Spain. pp.187-201. ⟨hal-02536223⟩
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