Cleft constructions fall under the scope of clause-combining studies in so far as they are complex constructions expressing a single proposition via bi-clausal syntax. They are productive in a number of Germanic and Romance languages including English and French (Filppula, 2009) and fulfil various discourse functions. While studies on clefts have traditionally focused on the relation with their canonical counterparts (Lambrecht, 2001), this study instead focuses on clefts in their full and reduced forms and adopts a contrastive viewpoint between English and French. Using corpus data consisting of spontaneous dialogues, we seek to identify the grammatically and prosodically coded meanings of clefts, particularly with regards to their information structure, as well as the discourse functions of their full vs. reduced forms in both languages.

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