Cover not available
Article published In:
Non-prototypical clefts
Edited by Lena Karssenberg, Karen Lahousse, Béatrice Lamiroy, Stefania Marzo and Ana Drobnjakovic
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 32] 2018
► pp. 53–85

Setting the boundaries

Presentational ci-sentences in Italian

| University of Vienna

Constructions that are typically used to introduce a new referent into the discourse may extend this function so as to introduce a new event or situation. In this paper, I examine the case of presentational ci-sentences in Italian, which have developed exactly this new function out of existential sentences. Despite being superficially similar to existential sentences, as well as to clefts, presentational ci-sentences must be kept separate from both sentence types, and must be treated as an independent construction with distinct structural and functional properties. Unlike existentials, presentational ci-sentences assert the existence of an event or situation and involve a predicational structure characterized by a CP (the relative clause) that functions as the predicate of the DP. Unlike clefts, which are typically used to mark narrow focus, presentational ci-sentences display a sentence-focus structure whereby the event is presented as all new. A contrastive analysis of presentational ci-sentences against existentials and clefts will thus allow us not only to understand the exact boundaries between these constructions, but also to identify more precisely the distinctive characteristic properties of each sentence type.

Keywords: presentational, cleft, existential, locative, focus, Italian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1PCS as non-prototypical clefts
    • 1.2Aims and structure of the paper
  • 2.Types of ci-sentences in Italian
    • 2.1 Ci as pro-argument
    • 2.2 Ci as pro-predicate
    • 2.3Presentational ci
  • 3.A comparison with existential and locative ci-sentences
    • 3.1The existential basis
    • 3.2Existentials and locatives with a CP
  • 4.The functions of the PCS construction
    • 4.1The focusing function of PCSs: A comparison with clefts
    • 4.2Pragmatic functions and uses of PCSs
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00016.cru
References
Abbott, Barbara
1992 “Definiteness, existentials, and the ‘list’ interpretation.” In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory II1, ed. by Chris Barker, and David Dowty, 1–16. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
1993 “A pragmatic account of the Definiteness Effect in existential sentences.” Journal of Pragmatics 191: 39–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bentley, Delia, and Silvio Cruschina
2016 “Existential Constructions”. In Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance, ed. by Susann Fischer, and Christoph Gabriel, 487–516. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bentley, Delia, Francesco Maria Ciconte, and Silvio Cruschina
2015 Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bentley, Delia
2004 “Definiteness effects: evidence from Sardinian”. Transactions of the Philological Society 102 (1): 57–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 “Sui costrutti esistenziali sardi. Effetti di definitezza, deissi, evidenzialità.” Zeitschrift fur Romanische Philologie 127 (1): 111–140.Google Scholar
Berretta, Monica
1995 “Come inseriamo elementi nuovi nel discorso/1: ‘C’è il gatto che ha fame’.” Italiano e Oltre 101: 212–217.Google Scholar
Berruto, Gaetano
1986 “Un tratto sintattico dell’italiano parlato: il c’è presentativo.” In Parallela 2. Aspetti della sintassi dell’italiano contemporaneo, ed. by Klaus Lichem, Edith Mara, and Susanne Knaller, 61–73. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina, Giuliano Bocci, and Silvio Cruschina
2015 “Focus fronting and its implicatures.” In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2013: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ Amsterdam 2013, ed. by Enoch Aboh, Jeannette Schaeffer, and Petra Sleeman, 1–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 “Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures.” Semantics and Pragmatics 9 (3): 1–54.Google Scholar
Bicler, Chris, and Kristin Davidse
2008 “It-clefts in casual conversational English: The weakening of their specificational meaning”. In Distinctions in English Grammar. Offered to Renaat Declerck, ed. by Bert Cappelle, and Naoaki Wada, 260–277. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight
1972 “A look at equations and cleft sentences”. In Studies for Einar Haugen Presented by his Friends and Colleagues, ed. by Evelyn Scherabon Firchow, Kaaren Grimstad, Nils Hasselmo, and Wayne O’Neill, 96–114. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Borschev, Vladimir, and Barbara Partee
2001 “The Russian genitive of negation in existentials sentences: The role of Theme-Rheme structure reconsidered.” In Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague, vol. 41, ed. by Eva Hajičová, Petr Sgall, Jiři Hana, and Tomáš Hoskovec, 185–250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Casalicchio, Jan
2013 Pseudorelative, gerundi e infiniti nelle varietà romanze: somiglianze (solo) superficiali e corrispondenze strutturali. München: LINCOM.Google Scholar
Collins, Peter C.
1992 “Cleft existentials in English”. Language Sciences 14(4): 419–433. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio
2012a “Focus in Existential Sentences.” In Enjoy Linguistics! Papers Offered to Luigi Rizzi on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, ed. by Valentina Bianchi, and Cristiano Chesi, 77–107. Siena: CISCL Press, [URL].
2012b Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 “Existential and locative constructions in Italo-Romance”. l’Italia Dialettale 751: 55–80.Google Scholar
2015a “Patterns of variation in existential constructions”. Isogloss. A journal on variation of Romance and Iberian languages 1(1): 33–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015b “Focus Structure”. In Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy, Delia Bentley, Francesco Maria Ciconte, and Silvio Cruschina, 43–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015c “Some notes on clefting and fronting.” In Structures, Strategies and Beyond. Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti, ed. by Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann, and Simona Matteini, 181–208. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 “Pseudo-existentials and Definiteness Effects in Italian.” In Definiteness Effects: Bilingual, Typological and Diachronic Variation, ed. by Susann Fischer, Tanja Kupisch, and Esther Rinke, 120–148. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Davidse, Kristin
1999 “The semantics of cardinal versus enumerative existential constructions”. Cognitive Linguistics 10(3): 203–250.Google Scholar
2014 “On specificational there-clefts”. Leuven Working Papers in Linguistics 151: 1–34.Google Scholar
Davidse, Kristin, and Ditte Kimps
2016 “Specificational there-clefts: Functional structure and information structure”. English Text Construction 9(1): 115–142. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cesare, Anna-Maria
2007 “Sul cosidetto ‘c’è presentativo’. Forme e funzioni.” Lessico, grammatica e testualità, tra italiano scritto e parlato, ed. by Anna-Maria De Cesare, and Angela Ferrari, 127–153. Basel: University of Basel.Google Scholar
2017 “Cleft constructions”. In Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax, ed. by Andreas Dufter, and Elisabeth Stark, 536–568. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Declerck, Renaat
1988 Studies on Copular Sentences, Cleſts and Pseudo-clefts. Dordrecht: Foris. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Delahunty, Gerald P.
1995 “The inferential construction”. Pragmatics 5(3): 341–364. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 “Discourse functions of inferential sentences”. Linguistics 39(3): 517–545. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Delahunty, Gerald P., and Laura Gatzkiewicz
2000 “On the Spanish inferential construction ser que ”. Pragmatics 10(3): 301–322. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Doetjes, Jenny, Georges Rebuschi, and Annie Rialland
2004 “Cleft Sentences”. In Handbook of French Semantics, ed. by Francis Corblin, and Henriëtte de Swart, 529–552. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Dufter, Andreas
2009 “Clefting and discourse organization: Comparing Germanic and Romance.” In Focus and Background in Romance Languages, ed. by Andreas Dufter, and Daniel Jacob, 83–121. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Francez, Itamar
2007 Existential Propositions. PhD Dissertation, Stanford.Google Scholar
2010 “Context dependence and implicit arguments in existentials.” Linguistics and Philosophy 33(1): 11–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara, and Francesca Ramaglia
2013 “(Pseudo)clefts at the syntax-prosody-discourse interface.” In Cleft Structures, ed. by Katharina Hartmann, and Tonjes Veenstra, 97–137. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 “The interpretation of clefting (a)symmetries between Italian and German.” In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2012. Selected Papers from ‘Going Romance’ Leuven 2012, ed. by Karen Lahousse, and Stefania Marzo, 65–89. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette K., and Thorstein Fretheim
2004 “Topic and focus”. In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Laurence R. Horn, and Gregory L. Ward, 175–196. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hazout, Ilan
2004 “The syntax of existential constructions.” Linguistic Inquiry 351: 393–430. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hedberg, Nancy Ann
1990 Discourse Pragmatics and Cleft Sentences in English. PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
2013 “Multiple focus and cleft sentences”. In Cleft Structures, ed. by Katharina Hartmann, and Tonjes Veenstra, 227–250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hedberg, Nancy
2000 “The referential status of clefts.” Language 761: 891–920. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jespersen, Otto
1937 Analytic Syntax. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Karssenberg, Lena
2018  Non-Prototypical Clefts in French: A corpus analysis of il y a clefts [Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 424]. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karssenberg, Lena, and Karen Lahousse
2018 “The information structure of French il y a clefts and c’est clefts: a corpus-based analysis”. Linguistics 56(3): 513–548. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karssenberg, Lena, Stefania Marzo, Karen Lahousse, and Daniela Guglielmo
2017 “There’s more to Italian c’è clefts than expressing all-focus”. Italian Journal of Linguistics 29(2): 57–85.Google Scholar
Karssenberg, Lena
2017 “French il y a clefts, existential sentences and the focus-marking hypothesis”. Journal of French Language Studies 27(3): 405–430. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiss, Katalin É.
1999 “The English Cleft Construction as a Focus Phrase.” In Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax, ed. by Lunella Mereu, 217–229. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klein, Wolfgang
2008 “The topic situation”. In Empirische Forschung und Theoriebildung: Beiträge aus Soziolinguistik, Gesprochene-Sprache- und Zweitspracherwerbsforschung: Festschrift für Norbert Dittmar, ed. by Bernt Ahrenholz, Ursula Bredel, Wolfgang Klein, Martina Rost-Roth, and Romuald Skiba, 287–305. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred
2007 “Basic notions of information structure.” In The Notions of Information Structure, ed. by Caroline Féry, Gisbert Fanselow, and Manfred Krifka, 13–55. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag.Google Scholar
Lahousse, Karen, and Marijke Borremans
2014 “The distribution of functional-pragmatic types of clefts in adverbial clauses”. Linguistics 52(3): 793–836. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud
1988 “Presentational cleft constructions in spoken French.” In Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse, ed. by John Haiman, and Sandra Thompson, 135–179. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1994 Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 “A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions.” Linguistics 39(3): 463–516. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 “Topic, focus, and secondary predication. The French Presentational Relative Construction.” In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2000, ed. by Claire Beyssade, Reineke Bok-Bennema, Frank Drijkoningen, and Paola Monachesi, 171–212. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leonetti, Manuel
2008 “Definiteness effects and the role of the coda in existential constructions.” In Essays on Nominal Determination, ed. by Henrik Høeg Müller, and Alex Klinge, 131–162. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marten, Lutz
2013 “Structure and interpretation in Swahili existential constructions.” Italian Journal of Linguistics 251: 45–73.Google Scholar
Marzo, Stefania, and Claudia Crocco
2015 “Tipicità delle costruzioni presentative per l’italiano neostandard.” Revue Romane 50(1): 30–50. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McNally, Louise
1997 A Semantics for the English Existential Construction. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
2011 “Existential sentences.” In Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. 21, ed. by Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, and Paul Portner, 1829–1848. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Milsark, Gary L.
1979 Existential Sentences in English. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Partee, Barbara, and Vladimir Borschev
2002 “Genitive of negation and scope of negation in Russian existential sentences.” In Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Second Ann Arbor Meeting 2001 (FASL 10), ed. by Jindrich Toman, 181–200. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications.Google Scholar
2007 “Existential sentences, BE, and the genitive of negation in Russian.” In Existence: Semantics and Syntax, ed. by Ileana Comorovski, and Klaus von Heusinger, 147–190. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F.
1978 “A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse”. Language 54(4): 883–906. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Roggia, Carlo Enrico
2009 Le frasi scisse in italiano. Struttura informativa e funzioni discorsive. Geneva: Slatkine.Google Scholar
Rooth, Mats
1992 “A theory of focus interpretation.” Natural Language Semantics 11: 75–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sornicola, Rosanna
2010 “La rappresentazione delle strutture locativo-esistenziali in un corpus di italiano. Uno studio sull’analizzabilità strutturale del discorso parlato.” Vox Romanica 691: 111–140.Google Scholar
Villalba, Xavier
2013 “Eventive existentials in Catalan and the topic-focus articulation.” Italian Journal of Linguistics 251: 147–173.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Agulló, Jorge
2023. Existential Constructions, Definiteness Effects, and Linguistic Contact: At the Crossroads between Spanish and Catalan. Languages 9:1 ► pp. 11 ff. DOI logo
Belligh, Thomas & Claudia Crocco
2022. Theticity and sentence-focus in Italian: grammatically encoded categories or categories of language use?. Linguistics 60:4 ► pp. 1241 ff. DOI logo
Belligh, Thomas, Ludovic De Cuypere & Claudia Crocco
2023. Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions. Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures 58:2 ► pp. 246 ff. DOI logo
Carlier, Anne & Karen Lahousse
2023. Chapter 5. Presentational clefts, existentials and information structure. In Existential Constructions across Languages [Human Cognitive Processing, 76], ► pp. 139 ff. DOI logo
Sarda, Laure & Ludovica Lena
2023. Chapter 1. Existential constructions. In Existential Constructions across Languages [Human Cognitive Processing, 76], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Wang, Yong
2021. Entity- vs. event-existentials: A new typology. Australian Journal of Linguistics 41:2 ► pp. 195 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.