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.
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.
Abbott, Barbara. 1993. “A pragmatic account of the Definiteness Effect in existential sentences.” Journal of Pragmatics 191: 39–55.
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.
Bentley, Delia, Francesco Maria Ciconte, and Silvio Cruschina. 2015. Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bentley, Delia. 2004. “Definiteness effects: evidence from Sardinian”. Transactions of the Philological Society 102 (1): 57–101.
Berretta, Monica. 1995. “Come inseriamo elementi nuovi nel discorso/1: ‘C’è il gatto che ha fame’.” Italiano e Oltre 101: 212–217.
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.
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.
Bianchi, Valentina, Giuliano Bocci, and Silvio Cruschina. 2016. “Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and evaluative implicatures.” Semantics and Pragmatics 9 (3): 1–54.
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.
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.
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.
Casalicchio, Jan. 2013. Pseudorelative, gerundi e infiniti nelle varietà romanze: somiglianze (solo) superficiali e corrispondenze strutturali. München: LINCOM.
Collins, Peter C.1992. “Cleft existentials in English”. Language Sciences 14(4): 419–433.
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]>.
Cruschina, Silvio. 2012b. Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Cruschina, Silvio. 2014. “Existential and locative constructions in Italo-Romance”. l’Italia Dialettale 751: 55–80.
Cruschina, Silvio. 2015a. “Patterns of variation in existential constructions”. Isogloss. A journal on variation of Romance and Iberian languages 1(1): 33–65.
Cruschina, Silvio. 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.
Cruschina, Silvio. 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.
Cruschina, Silvio. 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.
Davidse, Kristin. 1999. “The semantics of cardinal versus enumerative existential constructions”. Cognitive Linguistics 10(3): 203–250.
Davidse, Kristin. 2014. “On specificational there-clefts”. Leuven Working Papers in Linguistics 151: 1–34.
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.
De Cesare, Anna-Maria. 2017. “Cleft constructions”. In Manual of Romance Morphosyntax and Syntax, ed. by Andreas Dufter, and Elisabeth Stark, 536–568. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Declerck, Renaat. 1988. Studies on Copular Sentences, Cleſts and Pseudo-clefts. Dordrecht: Foris.
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.
Francez, Itamar. 2010. “Context dependence and implicit arguments in existentials.” Linguistics and Philosophy 33(1): 11–30.
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.
Frascarelli, Mara, and Francesca Ramaglia. 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.
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.
Hazout, Ilan. 2004. “The syntax of existential constructions.” Linguistic Inquiry 351: 393–430.
Hedberg, Nancy Ann. 1990. Discourse Pragmatics and Cleft Sentences in English. PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota.
Hedberg, Nancy Ann. 2013. “Multiple focus and cleft sentences”. In Cleft Structures, ed. by Katharina Hartmann, and Tonjes Veenstra, 227–250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hedberg, Nancy. 2000. “The referential status of clefts.” Language 761: 891–920.
Jespersen, Otto. 1937. Analytic Syntax. London: Allen and Unwin.
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.
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.
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.
Karssenberg, Lena. 2017. “French il y a clefts, existential sentences and the focus-marking hypothesis”. Journal of French Language Studies 27(3): 405–430.
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.
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.
Lahousse, Karen, and Marijke Borremans. 2014. “The distribution of functional-pragmatic types of clefts in adverbial clauses”. Linguistics 52(3): 793–836.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McNally, Louise. 1997. A Semantics for the English Existential Construction. New York: Garland.
McNally, Louise. 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.
Milsark, Gary L.1979. Existential Sentences in English. New York: Garland.
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.
Partee, Barbara, and Vladimir Borschev. 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.
Prince, Ellen F.1978. “A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse”. Language 54(4): 883–906.
Roggia, Carlo Enrico. 2009. Le frasi scisse in italiano. Struttura informativa e funzioni discorsive. Geneva: Slatkine.
Rooth, Mats. 1992. “A theory of focus interpretation.” Natural Language Semantics 11: 75–116.
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.
Villalba, Xavier. 2013. “Eventive existentials in Catalan and the topic-focus articulation.” Italian Journal of Linguistics 251: 147–173.
Cited by (10)
Cited by ten other publications
Lena, Ludovica
2024. Encoding indefinite human reference without indefinite pronouns: the case of Chinese presentationals. Folia Linguistica 58:3 ► pp. 659 ff.
2024. Looking for someone: The encoding of indefinite human reference in Chinese/English aligned translation. Lingua 308 ► pp. 103753 ff.
Agulló, Jorge
2023. Existential Constructions, Definiteness Effects, and Linguistic Contact: At the Crossroads between Spanish and Catalan. Languages 9:1 ► pp. 11 ff.
AGULLÓ, JORGE
2024. El efecto de definitud en variedades del español en contacto con catalán: nuevos datos dialectales. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 101:9 ► pp. 815 ff.
Belligh, Thomas, Ludovic De Cuypere & Claudia Crocco
2022. Theticity and sentence-focus in Italian: grammatically encoded categories or categories of language use?. Linguistics 60:4 ► pp. 1241 ff.
Wang, Yong
2021. Entity- vs. event-existentials: A new typology. Australian Journal of Linguistics 41:2 ► pp. 195 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 december 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.