caa a22 4500 386359458 CHVBK 20180307111910.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198906 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0305000900010400 doi S0305000900010400 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0305000900010400 How to make young children produce cleft sentences [Elektronische Daten] The present study focuses on the effects of contextual demands on the selection of a particular syntactic device, in asking whether French-speaking children from 4 to 10 years old will spontaneously produce it-cleft sentences if there is a functional necessity arising from the context. Taking into account recent studies that have specified the discourse function(s) served by this marked sentence form, it was hypothesized that the cleft formulation would be more likely than its uncleft counterpart whenever the child's intention was to contrast their own belief or knowledge with that of their addressee. The study showed this to be the case when the matter of the disagreement concerned the agent of an action: that situation elicited an overwhelming majority (from 80% to 97%) of cleft constructions, even from the youngest children. On the other hand, when the matter of the disagreement concerned the patient, there were only a few cleft constructions, even with the oldest children; contrastive stress on the object constituent was the predominant device employed for marking information in that situation. The high proportion of clefts in the Agent condition, and the high proportion of stressed object constituents in the Patient condition, both differ from previously reported data. These differences are discussed with reference to differences in task requirements and to differences between the prosodie constraints of French and English. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 Hupet Michel University of Louvain Tilmant Brigitte University of Louvain Journal of Child Language Cambridge University Press 16/2(1989-06), 251-261 0305-0009 16:2<251 1989 16 JCL https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900010400 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900010400 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Hupet Michel University of Louvain NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Tilmant Brigitte University of Louvain NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of Child Language Cambridge University Press 16/2(1989-06), 251-261 0305-0009 16:2<251 1989 16 JCL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge