An empirical approach to the pragmatics of the French c’est-cleft Emilie Destruel University of Iowa 1 Introduction Special syntactic patterns often go hand-in-hand with special meanings. One case is found in Hungarian, where the immediate preverbal position is often argued to be semantically exhaustive (Kiss 1998). A preverbal focus element must be interpreted exhaustively (1a), but this is not required of a focus element realized in situ (1b). This claim is often extended to English (Delin and Oberlander 1995), where the it-cleft is said to behave similarly (2). (1) a. Tegnap last este night MARINAK Mary. DAT mutattam introduced.I be PERF P´ etert. Peter. ACC ‘Last night I introduced Peter TO MARY (and to no one else).’ b. Tegnap este be mutattam P´ etert MARINAK. ‘Last night I introduced Peter TO MARY (and possibly to someone else too).’ (2) a. It was a PIZZA that Mary ate. (‘Mary ate a pizza and nothing else’). b. Mary ate a PIZZA.(‘Mary ate a pizza and possibly something else’). Similar cleft structures are extremely common in French. The language is widely known for resorting to non-canonical word order as the main strategy to signal focus because the language lacks the flexibility to stress words based on pitch ac- cents. More specifically, the c’est-cleft, ‘c’est X COMP Y’, is described as being the structure used to signal focus on arguments, and the structure used to express ex- haustivity (Lambrecht 1994). Therefore, (3a) is pragmatically preferred over (3b) and comes along with the implication that ‘Marie’ is the only person for whom the predicate holds true. The SVO form on the other hand does not have this exhaustive inference. (3) a. C’ EST MARIE qui entame ses recherches sur le rayonnement de l’uranium pour son doctorat. ‘It is Marie (and no one else) who is starting her research on uranium radiation for her doctorate’. b. #MARIE entame ses recherches sur le rayonnement de l’uranium pour son doctorat. Marie (and possible someone else) is starting her research on uranium radiation for her doctorate’.