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The Grammatical Realization of Polarity Contrast: Theoretical, empirical, and typological approaches
Edited by Christine Dimroth and Stefan Sudhoff
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 249] 2018
► pp. 255–288

In search for polarity contrast marking in Italian

A contribution from echo replies

| University of Turin
| Ghent University

This paper examines polarity contrast marking in Italian, analyzing replies to questions and assertions in Map Task dialogues and read speech. We examine the frequency of echo replies, their syntactic and prosodic properties, and the frequency of verum focus. The results show that echo replies are recurrent, and even preferred, when a correction is involved. Narrow and verum focus are attested, although the latter is not common, and can also be due to morpho-syntactic manipulations such as clitic right dislocation. The results confirm the instability of polarity contrast marking in Italian and suggest that the use of marking devices is sensitive to pragmatic factors, especially in connection with the different functions of polarity contrast in discourse.

Keywords: polarity contrast, echo reply, verum focus, dislocation, Italian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Polarity, focus, and contrast: Terminological distinctions
    • 2.2Polarity contrast marking from a comparative perspective
    • 2.3Polarity contrast markers in Italian
      • 2.3.1Prosodic encoding
      • 2.3.2Lexical and syntactic encoding
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Corpora, methods and research questions
    • 3.2Results
      • 3.2.1Frequency of clausal and echo replies (Corpus 1)
      • 3.2.2Corpus 1: Syntactic format of echo replies
      • 3.2.3Prosodic analysis of echo replies: Corpus 1
      • 3.2.4Corpus 2: Prosodic analysis of verbal echo replies
  • 4.Discussion and final remarks
  • Notes
  • Appendix
  • References
Published online: 30 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.249.09and
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