When Data Challenges Theory

In this paper, we pursue two main (interconnected) goals, relying on a comparable and parallel corpus of French and Italian cleft sentences. First, we assess the most typical formal and functional properties of clefts in these languages, while also considering variation due to the different types of data. Second, we verify the presence of interference in the translation of clefts from French into Italian. Translators’ choices mostly align with information-structural patterns found in original It