Scrambling as verum focus: German scrambling meets Romance anaphoric anteposition.

In this paper I demonstrate that in Mòcheno, a German dialect spoken in Northern Italy, scrambling, i.e. the movement of any constituent above sentential adverbs and below the finite verb, is permitted like in Continental Germanic languages. Unlike in these languages, however, leftward movement is not triggered by specificity or scope-fixing (A-scrambling) or by the need to check any topic or contrastive/new-information focus discourse-features (A’-scrambling). By relying on information structure, the syntax of modal particles and the distribution of scrambling in sentences with fronted operators, I provide evidence that scrambling in Mòcheno triggers a verum focus reading on the truth value of the sentence and involves a type of focus movement to a FocusP in CP. That scrambling can be associated with verum focus is a unicum among Continental Germanic languages, which I show follows from a reanalyis of the properties of Germanic focus scrambling under the influence of Romance anaphoric anteposition

One-loop F(R,P,Q) gravity in de Sitter universe

Motivated by the dark energy issue, the one-loop quantization approach for a class of relativistic higher order theories is discussed in some detail. A specific F(R,P,Q) gravity model at the one-loop level in a de Sitter universe is investigated, extending the similar program developed for the case of $F(R)$ gravity. The stability conditions under arbitrary perturbations are derived.Comment: Latex, 10 pages, to appear in J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. (special issue in honor of Prof. S. Dowker

f(R) Gravities \`a la Brans-Dicke

We extend f(R) theories via the addition of a fundamental scalar field. The approach is reminiscent of the dilaton field of string theory and the Brans-Dicke model. f(R) theories attracted much attention recently in view of their potential to explain the acceleration of the universe. Extending f(R) models to theories with scalars can be motivated from the low energy effective action of string theory. There, a fundamental scalar (the dilaton), has a non-minimal coupling to the Ricci scalar. Furthermore beyond tree level actions will contain terms having higher (or lower) powers of R compared to the canonical Einstein-Hilbert term. Theories with f(R) will contain an extra scalar degree on top of the ad-hoc dilaton and mixing of these two modes around a stable solution is a concern. In this work we show that no mixing condition mandates the form $V_{1}(\phi)f(R)+V_{2}(\phi)R^{2}$ for the action