Denis Delfitto

List of John Benjamins publications for which Denis Delfitto plays a role.

Articles

In this contribution, we offer a contextualist analysis of names whereby a name N is used as a felicitous referential term in all and only those contexts of utterance in which N is intended to refer to a unique referent by all cognitive agents that are relevant in the context. This analysis has… read more
Delfitto, Denis, Chiara Melloni and Maria Vender 2019 The (en)rich(ed) meaning of expletive negationEvolutionary Linguistic Theory 1:1, pp. 57–89 | Article
This contribution addresses the issue of one of the instances of non-standard negation, the so-called expletive negation (EN). Though it discusses data from a variety of languages, it mainly concentrates on Italian, proposing that the behavior of EN in comparative, exclamative and temporal… read more
Hu, Shenai, Maria Vender, Gaetano Fiorin and Denis Delfitto 2018 The comprehension of Italian negation in Mandarin-Italian sequential bilingual childrenOn the Acquisition of the Syntax of Romance, Gavarró, Anna (ed.), pp. 169–184 | Chapter
This study investigates how sequential bilingual Mandarin-speaking children who had more than three years of exposure to Italian comprehended Italian negative sentences in comparison with affirmative ones. Sixteen bilingual children and 16 Italian monolingual peers were tested using a truth-value… read more
Delfitto, Denis and Gaetano Fiorin 2015 Exhaustivity operators and fronted focus in ItalianStructures, Strategies and Beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti, Di Domenico, Elisa, Cornelia Hamann and Simona Matteini (eds.), pp. 163–180 | Article
In this contribution we present an original analysis of Fronted Focus in Italian (contrastive/corrective focus in the terminology of Belletti 2004), based on the insight that Fronted Focus can be decomposed into Contrast and the Exhaustivity Operator involved in the computation of grammaticalized… read more
In this contribution, we examine four cases of prepositionless genitive assignment: (a) certain alleged cases of N+N composition in Modern Italian that respond positively to important diagnostics for syntactic behavior; (b) the so-called Juxtaposition Genitive widely attested in Old French; (c) the… read more