Towards a Fine-Grained Theory of Focus

This paper investigates the roles of focus, arguing that such a notion is too wide and can be applied to several phenomena. I show that focus needs to be further specified for (at least) another feature and is therefore made of smaller primitive traits. These can combine to create bundles of features, which give rise to the several types of foci we know. Moreover, these features are subject to parametrization and can thus account for cross-linguistic differences

Existentials and Locatives in Romance Dialects of Italy

This volume provides the first ever large-scale comparative treatment of there sentences (there copula NP), reporting the results of a survey of Italo-Romance and Sardinian dialects of Italy. The volume comprises detailed discussions of focus structure, predication and argument realization, the definiteness effects, and the linking from semantics to syntax in there sentences, advancing novel proposals in each case. The testing of influential hypotheses on existential constructions against first-hand dialect evidence leads the book to argue that existential and locative there sentences differ in focus structure and semantics, although their not being predicate focus constructions and the non-canonicality of the predicate—which is typically referential—is reflected in their shared morphosyntactic features. The hypothesis that the pivot is the predicate of the existential construction is adopted in the analysis, although a distinction is drawn between referential and non-referential pivots, which explains variation in pivot behaviour in morphosyntax. The volume also provides the historical background of Romance there sentences, relying on the findings of the analysis of a substantial corpus of early Italo-Romance vernacular texts

Focus Fronting and its implicatures

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 present the results of a syntactic experiment which show that FF is possible in corrective and mirative contexts, but not in merely contrastive contexts. This distribution proves that, contrary to claims that are dominant in the literature, contrast and/or givenness of the background are not necessary conditions for Italian FF. Our second experiment highlights a systematic prosodic difference between the two focus types, showing that the corrective and mirative interpretations are grammatically distinct. We claim that these special interpretations associated with FF are conventional implicatures which are syntactically encoded and which trigger syntactic fronting