Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- General introduction -- Part I: Delimitation of il y a clefts -- 1. Criteria for clefthood in previous studies -- 2. Corpora and extraction -- 3. Application of criteria to the corpus data -- Part II: Distribution, morphosyntactic and semantic properties -- 4. Il y a clefts: two semantic types (eventive vs. specificational) -- 5. Il n'y a que clefts -- Part III: Functions of il y a clefts -- 6. The function of avoiding "bad" preverbal subjects -- 7. The information structure of il y a clefts -- 8. Information structure: c'est clefts vs. il y a clefts -- 9. Other pragmatic functions of il y a clefts -- Part IV: Italian c'è clefts (vs. French il y a clefts) -- 10. Italian c'è clefts (vs. French il y a clefts) -- Part V: Il y a clefts: compositionality and status as a construction -- 11. The compositionality of il y a clefts -- 12. No evidence (yet) for il y a clefts as a construction -- General conclusion -- Appendix -- Bibliography -- Index