In this paper, I discuss a periphrastic construction involving the verb go in Sicilian that is used to express surprise and unexpectedness with respect to a past event. I show that the special meaning and function of this structure is best accounted for by postulating that in this construction… read more
It is commonly held that focus fronting exhibits similar properties to wh-movement. The syntactic parallelism between the two types of movement has been supported by the semantic analyses of wh-questions that assume that when wh-words function as interrogative operators, they are inherently… read more
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… read more
The object of study of this paper is a Romance construction characterized by the presence of the complementizer in root clauses and by an evidential or epistemic meaning (i.e. C-constructions). In these structures, the complementizer is preceded by a functional element that morphologically… read more
In this paper we investigate the distributional, morphosyntactic, and semantic properties of a particular construction found in Romance, as well as in other languages such as English. This construction involves a class of elements that appear in sentence-initial position and that are followed by… read more
In this paper we investigate the essential semantic and pragmatic features associated with Focus Fronting (FF) in Italian, with the ultimate aim of identifying the actual trigger of this syntactic operation. After introducing the different contexts that could in principle be compatible with FF, we… read more
In this paper I test the predictions of a conjecture formulated in Belletti (2008), according to which the distinction between subject and non-subject clefts as answering strategies should not hold in languages in which information focus and contrastive focus are both realized in the left periphery… read more
This paper focuses on the syntactic role of the features related to discourse and information structure. It is argued that information-structure notions are encoded in syntax as syntactic features projecting their own phrase structure, and are fundamental in accounting for cross-linguistic… read more