Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article investigates the grammatical realization of the notion of focus in Colloquial French and Standard French. Based on two production experiments, the article reveals three findings: (i) focus marking is not as categorical as previously acknowledged, (ii) focus marking asymmetry for subjects vs. non-subjects is only supported in CoF and (iii) there is no strict relationship between focus realization and interpretation in either variety. I develop a stochastic optimality-theory analysis, which explains the canonical-cleft sentence alternation in terms of prosody and expands on past literature by accounting for the variation observed both within and across language variety.
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