Cover not available
Part of
Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish: Diachronic, Variationist and Comparative Perspectives
Edited by Andreas Dufter and Álvaro S. Octavio de Toledo y Huerta
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 214] 2014
► pp. 383–418

Chapter 13. A comparative look at Focus Fronting 
in Romance

| University of Vienna
The aim of this paper is to describe the syntax and semantics of Focus Fronting (FF) constructions in a range of Romance languages, including both regional and diachronic varieties, in order to reclassify these constructions on the basis of a common comparative ground. I shall begin with a look at some Sardinian data, mostly already presented in earlier research literature, since this Romance language uses FF in more contexts than other Modern Romance varieties. Sardinian not only employs FF with argumental and adjunct constituents, but also with predicates. Moreover, Sardinian FF does not necessarily yield a contrastive interpretation, as FF of constituents usually does in Italian and Spanish, but it can also encode pure Information Focus, although an emphatic value is often added. Using a set of syntactic and semantic-pragmatic properties defined principally for Sardinian, I will analyze similar FF data – Quantifier Raising (QP-fronting), Stylistic Fronting (SF), Mirative Fronting, Emphatic Focus etc. – in other Romance varieties and outline the similarities and differences found between these varieties. This will result in a systematic, descriptive overview of the crosslinguistic variation of FF found across the Romance languages.
Published online: 31 July 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.214.19rem
References (77)
References
Primary Sources
Archivi del Sud. 1996. Contami unu Contu. Racconti popolari della Sardegna. Vol. I: Logudoro. Alghero: Archivi del Sud.Google Scholar
CREA – Real Academia española: Banco de datos (CREA) [online]. Corpus de referencia del español actual . <[URL]> (13 October 2012).
Falconi, Nanni. 2003. Su cuadorzu . Cagliari:Condaghes.Google Scholar
Sa-Limba. 1999–2011. Electronic corpus of the mailing list ‘Sa-Limba’ . Cologne/Berlin. [URL] (1 April 2012).
Research Literature
Arregi, Karlos. 2003. Clitic left dislocation is contrastive topicalization. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium [U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 9.1], Elsi Kaiser & Sudha Arunchalam (eds), 31–44. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania, Department of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Benincà, Paola. 1988. L’ ordine degli elementi della frase e le costruzioni marcate. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione , Vol. 1, Lorenzo Renzi (ed.), 129–194. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
. 2004. The left periphery of Medieval Romance. Studi Filologici e Linguistici Online 2(2): 243–297.Google Scholar
. 2006. A detailed map of the left periphery of Medieval Romance. In Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics: Negation, Tense, and Clausal Architecture , Raffaella Zanuttini, Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger & Paul Portner (eds), 53–86. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Bentley, Delia. 2011. Sui costrutti esistenziali sardi. Effetti di definitezza, deissi, evidenzialità. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 127(1): 111–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blasco Ferrer, Eduardo. 1994. Ello ellus: Grammatica sarda . Nuoro: Poliedro.Google Scholar
Blühdorn, Hardarik. 2012. Faktizität, Wahrheit, Erwünschtheit: Negation, Negationsfokus und “Verum”-Fokus im Deutschen. In Wahrheit – Fokus – Negation [Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 18], Horst Lohnstein & Hardarik Blühdorn (eds), 137–170. Hamburg: Buske.Google Scholar
Bowers, John. 1993. The syntax of predication. Linguistic Inquiry 24(4): 591–656.Google Scholar
Brunetti, Lisa. 2004. A Unification of Focus . Padua: Unipress.Google Scholar
. 2009. Discourse functions of fronted foci in Italian and Spanish. In Focus and Background in Romance Languages [Studies in Language Companion Series 112], Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds), 43–81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Büring, Daniel. 1999. Topic. In Focus. Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives , Peter Bosch & Rob van der Sandt (eds), 142–165. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Camus Bergareche, Bruno. 2008. Avance de cuantificadores en español medieval. In Actas del VII Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española , Vol. 1, Concepción Company Company & José G. Moreno de Alba (eds.), 431–448. Madrid: Arco Libros.Google Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna. 2005. Stylistic fronting in Italian. In Grammar in Focus , Lars-Olof Delsing, Cecilia Falk, Gunlög Josefsson & Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson (eds), 47–55. Lund: Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1990. Types of A’-dependencies . Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Corda, Francesco. 1994. Grammatica moderna del sardo logudorese con una proposta ortografica, elementi di metrica e un glossario. Cagliari: Della Torre.Google Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio. 2006. Informational focus in Sicilian and the left periphery. In Phases of Interpretation . Mara Frascarelli (ed.), 363–385. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. Fronting as focalization in Sicilian. In Syntactic Variation. The Dialects of Italy , Roberta D’Alessandro, Ian Roberts & Adam Ledgeway (eds), 247–260. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
. 2011. Focalization and word order in Old Italo-Romance. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 10: 92–135.Google Scholar
. 2012. Discourse-related Features and Functional Projections . Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio & Remberger, Eva-Maria. 2009. Focus Fronting in Sardinian and Sicilian . In Proceedings XXXV Incontro di Grammatica Generativa 2009 [University of Siena CISCL Working Papers 3], Vincenzo Moscati & Emilio Servidio (eds), 118–130. Siena: Università di Siena.Google Scholar
Egerland, Verner. 2011. Fronting, background, focus: A comparative study of Sardinian and Icelandic. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 87: 103–135.Google Scholar
Escandell, María Victoria & Leonetti, Manuel. 2009. La expresión del Verum Focus en español. Español Actual 92: 11–46.Google Scholar
. 2011. Bastantes problemas (*no) tenemos . In 60 problemas de gramática , María Victoria Escandell, Manuel Leonetti & Cristina Sánchez (eds), 253–260. Madrid: Akal.Google Scholar
Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés. 2009. Orden de palabras, tópicos y focos en la prosa alfonsí. Alcanate 6: 139–172.Google Scholar
Fischer, Susann. 2005. Construcciónes con avance estilístico en el catalán antiguo. Caplletra 38: 119–135.Google Scholar
Floricic, Franck. 2004. Negation et interrogation en Sarde. Ms. of a talk given at the Colloque Typologie des langues, universaux linguistiques: La négation et les énoncés non susceptibles d’être niés (TYPO 4). Paris: Institut Universitaire de France.Google Scholar
. 2009. Negation and focus clash in Sardinian. In Information Structure and its Interfaces , Lunella Mereu (ed.), 129–152. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2012. ‘Bare quantifiers’ and topics in Italian. Ms, Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle & LPP (CNRS).Google Scholar
Franco, Irene. 2009. Verbs, Subjects and Stylistic Fronting: A comparative analysis of the Interaction of CP Properties with Verb movement and Subject Positions in Icelandic and Old Italian. PhD dissertation. University of Siena.Google Scholar
Frey, Werner. 2010. Ā-Movement and conventional implicatures: About the grammatical encoding of emphasis in German. Lingua 120(6): 1416–1435. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gallego, Angel. 2007. Defectivitat morfològica i variació sintàctica. Caplletra 42: 219–250.Google Scholar
Giurgea, Ion. 2011. How can a bare quantifier be a topic? Talk given at The 41th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages , University of Ottawa.Google Scholar
Giurgea, Ion & Remberger, Eva-Maria. 2011a. Left peripheral interactions in Romance and the syntactic representation of information-structural features. Ms. , University of Konstanz.Google Scholar
. 2011b. Indefinite pronouns as contrastive topics. Talk given at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea , Universidad de la Rioja, Logroño, September 2011.Google Scholar
. 2012a. Zur informationsstrukturellen Konfiguration und Variation postverbaler Subjekte in den romanischen Null-Subjekt-Sprachen. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 31(1): 43–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2012b. Verum focus and polar questions. Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics 14(2): 21–40.Google Scholar
Giurgea, Ion&Remberger, Eva-Maria. In press. Polarity fronting in Romanian and Sardinian. In Selected proceedings of LSRL 41 , Marie-Hélène Côté, Éric Mathieu&Shana Poplack (eds).
Grimaldi, Lucia. 2010. Dalla LSU alla LSC: Itinerari della standardizzazione del sardo. In Actes du XXVe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes , Vol. 3, Maria Iliescu, Heidi Siller-Runggaldier & Paul Danler (eds), 563–572. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Höhle, Tilman. 1992. Über Verum-Fokus im Deutschen. In Informationsstruktur und Grammatik , Joachim Jacobs (ed.), 112–141. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, Michael Allan. 1988. Auxiliary verbs in Sardinian. Transactions of the Philological Society 86(2): 173–203. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1993. Sardinian Syntax . London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ladd, Robert. 1981. A first look at the semantics and pragmatics of negative questions and tag questions. In Papers from the Seventeenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society , 164–171. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistics Society.
Leonetti, Manuel. 2009. Remarks on focus structure and non-specificity. In Proceedings of the IV International NEREUS Workshop ‘Definiteness and DP Structure in Romance Languages’ , María Teresa Espinal, Manuel Leonetti & Louise McNally (eds), 83–111. Konstanz: Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Konstanz.Google Scholar
Leonetti, Manuel & Escandell, María Victoria. 2009. Fronting and verum focus in Spanish. In Focus and Background in Romance Languages [Studies in Language Companion Series 112], Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds), 155–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
. 2010. Las anteposiciones inductoras de foco de polaridad. In La renovación de la palabra en el bicentenario de la Argentina. Los colores de la mirada lingüística , Victor M. Castel & Liliana Cubo de Severino (eds), 733–743. Mendoza: Ed. de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo.Google Scholar
Lepori, Antonio. 2001. Gramàtiga sarda po is campidanesus: Duas obras in d-unu libru. Compendio di grammatica campidanese per italofoni. Quartu Sant’Elena: Ed. C.R.Google Scholar
Lohnstein, Horst & Stommel, Hildegard. 2009. Verum focus and phases. In Linguistic Analysis 35: 109–140. Special Issue Phase Edge Investigations , Phoevos Panagiotis & Kleanthes Grohmann (eds).Google Scholar
Lohnstein, Horst. 2012. Verum Fokus – Satzmodus – Wahrheit. In Wahrheit – Fokus – Negation [Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 18], Horst Lohnstein & Hardarik Blühdorn (eds), 31–67. Hamburg: Buske.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Alessandra. 2007. Posizione dei clitici e ordine dei costituenti nella lingua sarda medievale. In Sui dialetti italoromanzi. Saggi in onore di Nigel B. Vincent [The Italianist 27, Special supplement 1], Delia Bentley & Adam Ledgeway (eds), 133–147. Norfolk: Biddles.Google Scholar
Lörinczi, Marinella. 1999. L’interrogazione in sardo / Preguntai in sardu. Romanistik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 5(1): 101–112.Google Scholar
Maling, Joan. 1990. Inversion in embedded clauses in Modern Icelandic. In Syntax & Semantics, Modern Icelandic Syntax 24, Joan Maling & Annie Zaenen (eds), 191–215. New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Mensching, Guido & Grimaldi, Lucia. 2005. Limba Sarda Unificada: Zu den jüngsten Bestrebungen der Standardisierung des Sardischen. In Normen und Normenkonflikte in der Romania , Carsten Sinner (ed.), 59–87. Munich: Peniope/Anja Gärtig.Google Scholar
Mensching, Guido & Remberger, Eva-Maria. 2010a. Focus Fronting and the left periphery in Sardinian. In Syntactic Variation. The Dialects of Italy , Roberta D’Alessandro, Ian Roberts & Adam Ledgeway (eds), 261–276. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
. 2010b. La periferia sinistra romanza: topicalizzazione, focalizzazione e interrogazione in sardo. In Actes du XXVe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes , Vol. 7, Maria Iliescu, Heidi Siller-Runggaldier & Paul Danler (eds), 189–197. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Michaelis, Laura. 2001. Exclamative constructions. In Language Typology and Language Universals , Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher & Wolfgang Raible (eds), 1038–1050. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Molnár, Valéria. 2010. Stylistic fronting and discourse. Ms. of the talk given at the colloquium Focus, Contrast, and Givenness in Interaction with Extraction and Deletion , University of Tübingen, SFB 833-A7, March 2010.
Pittau, Massimo. 1972. Grammatica del sardo nuorese: il più conservativo dei parlari neo-latini . Bologna: Patron.Google Scholar
Poletto, Cecilia. 2006. Parallel phases: A study on the high and low left periphery of Old Italian. In Phases of Interpretation , Mara Frascarelli (ed.), 261–295. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2008. Die linke Peripherie der “unteren Phase”: OV-Stellung im Altitalieni-schen. In Romanistische Syntax – Minimalistisch , Guido Mensching & Eva-Maria Remberger (eds), 131–156. Tübingen:Narr.Google Scholar
Poole, Geoffrey. 2007. Defending the “subject gap” requirement: Stylistic fronting in Germanic and Romance. In Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 79, Christopher Platzack (ed.), 1–19. Lund: Centre of Language and Literature.Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2012. Conventional implicature and expressive content. In Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning , Vol. 3, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds), 2516–2536. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Quer, Josep. 2002. Edging quantifiers. On QP-fronting in Western Romance. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2000 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 232], Claire Beyssade, Reineke Bok-Bennema, Frank Drijkoningen & Paola Monachesi (eds), 253–270. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Remberger, Eva-Maria. 2010a. Left peripheral interactions in Sardinian. Lingua 120(3): 555–581. Special Issue: Exploring the Left Periphery , Kleanthes K. Grohmann & Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli (eds). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010b. Left peripheral Interactions in Romance. Talk given at the colloquium Focus, Contrast, and Givenness in Interaction with Extraction and Deletion , University of Tübingen, SFB 833-A7, March 2010.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of Grammar: Handbook in Generative Syntax , Liliane Haegeman (ed.), 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Rohlfs, Gerhard. 1969. Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, Vol. 3: Sintassi e formazione delle parole . Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Romani, Patrizia. 2006. Tiempos de formación romance I. Los tiempos compuestos. In Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española. Primera parte: La frase verbal , Vol. 1, Concepción Company Company (ed.), 241–346. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica y Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.Google Scholar
Romero, Maribel. 2006. Biased yes/no questions: The role of VERUM. Sprache und Datenverarbeitung 30: 9–24.Google Scholar
Romero, Maribel & Chung-Hye Han. 2004. On negative yes/no questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(5): 609–658. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition . 2nd edn . Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 2007. The Syntax of Icelandic . Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vanelli, Laura. 1999. Ordine delle parole e articolazione pragmatica dell’italiano antico: La ‘prominenza’ pragmatica della prima posizione nella frase. Medioevo Romanzo 23(2): 229–246.Google Scholar
Zanuttini, Raffaella & Portner, Paul. 2003. Exclamative clauses: At the syntax-semantics interface. Language 79(1): 39–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Cruschina, Silvio
2015. Some notes on clefting and fronting*. In Structures, Strategies and Beyond [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 223], ► pp. 181 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 july 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.