The Interaction of Focus and Givenness in Italian Clause Structure (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics)
The Interaction of Focus and Givenness in Italian Clause Structure (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics) by Vieri Samek-Lodovici
English | Nov. 17, 2015 | ISBN: 0198737920 | 351 Pages | PDF | 5 MB
English | Nov. 17, 2015 | ISBN: 0198737920 | 351 Pages | PDF | 5 MB
This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse-given phrases. Vieri Samek-Lodovici disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by highly productive operations affecting discourse given phrases in Italian, namely right dislocation and marginalization. Based on a vast aggregate of evidence, he shows that in the default case contrastive focalization occurs in situ and that left-peripheral focalization patterns arise from the interaction with right dislocation and generalize well beyond the familiar cases examined in Rizzi (1997) and most literature since. In the final chapter, the author examines how the key properties unveiled in the previous sections, such as focalization in situ, follow from the prosodic constraints governing stress placement, thus reinterpreting and extending Zubizarreta's (1998) insight about the role of prosody in shaping syntax.