In this paper, I investigate French il y a-clefts ('there is-clefts’) that are semantically specificational(e.g. ‘Are there vegetarians in your family?’ — Oui, il y a ma soeur qui estvégétarienne “Yes, there’s my sister who’s a vegetarian”). I show on the basis of a qualitativecorpus analysis in three different registers of French that this type of cleft is lessuniform than previously assumed in terms of its semantics, discourse functions and informationstructure properties.
