Shirley Carter-Thomas. The French c’est-cleft : functional and formal motivations. La linguistique systémique fonctionnelle et la langue française, L’Harmattan, pp.127 – 157, 2009, 978-2-296-09278-5.

This article will examine the French c’est-cleft, a marked word order construction that can be considered as the formal equivalent of the English it-cleft. The French c’est-cleft is considerably more frequent than the English it-cleft, being widespread both in spoken language and writing. I discuss some of the formal language-specific conditions that contribute to the greater use of the c’est-cleft in French.