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Revue Romane
Vol. 58:2 (2023) ► pp.246–277
articles linguistiques

Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions

A case study

| Ghent University
| Ghent University
ORCID logo | Ghent University

In this article we study the alternation between the two most prominent Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions, viz. the Syntactic Inversion Construction (henceforth: SIC), e.g. Arriva il treno (‘The train is arriving’), and the Presentational Cleft (henceforth: PC), e.g. C’è il treno che arriva (‘The train is arriving’). Based on the existing literature on the two constructions and drawing inspiration from a number of cognitive-functional hypotheses pertaining to constraints on the amount of referentially new constituents that can be conveyed in a single clause, we put forward the hypothesis that Italian language users are more likely to prefer the PC over the SIC if the utterance involves a high number of referentially new constituents. To assess this hypothesis, we constructed a pilot experiment consisting of a 100-split forced choice task that was administered by means of an online questionnaire to 66 native speaker participants. The results of the experiment indicate that the preference for the PC indeed increases if the number of referentially new constituents is higher. This is however not the only factor involved in the alternation and the preference of the language users seems not only to be determined by the number of referentially new constituents, but also by their syntactic status.

Keywords: alternating constructions, theticity, sentence-focus, number of constituents, referential givenness, transitivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1What are thetic and sentence-focus constructions?
    • 2.2Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions
      • 2.2.1An overview of the constructions involved
      • 2.2.2The syntactic inversion construction
      • 2.2.3The presentational cleft
      • 2.2.4A remark regarding multifunctionality
    • 2.3The alternation between the SIC and the PC
    • 2.4Hypothesis for the alternation between Italian PC and SIC
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Administration of the questionnaire and participant data
    • 3.2The experiment
      • 3.2.1The 100-split task
      • 3.2.2Items used
    • 3.3Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Results
    • 4.2Discussion
    • 4.3Strengths, limitations and possible avenues for future research
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.16006.bel
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