Confronting Focus Strategies in Finnish and in Italian: An Experimental Study on Object Focusing

Focus is cross-linguistically associated with a number of different strategies, such as fronting, clefting, markers, and prosody. In some cases, the choice between one strategy or another is determined by language-specific rules, while in others, two or more strategies seem to be optional, and thus, somehow “unpredictable”. In this experimental study, we investigate the syntactic strategies employed in object focusing in Finnish and in Italian by examining the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features underlying the choice of a specific Focus strategy. In particular, the present experiment is aimed to investigate two strategies employed in both languages for object Focus realization, namely, Focus in situ and fronting, in order to verify whether the choice between them is influenced by a specific type of feature, a combination of Focus-related features, the verb category involved, or the interplay between these three factors. The incidence of alternative constructions, in particular clefting in Italian and the -hAn discourse marker in Finnish, is also taken into consideration, and relevant asymmetries are analyzed in a comprehensive, comparative account

Italian Factive islands are not ‘that weak’: new evidence from the factive/bridge distinction.

Long-distance dependencies are a major property of human language, deriving from the successive application of movement operations across sentences. Nevertheless, this possibility seems to be restricted by the presence of barriers, which ‘trap’ constituents in more or less 'resistant' syntactic islands. Given this scenario, this paper paper investigates a specific type of island, namely factive complements, which are traditionally considered ‘weak’ islands. The main goal is thus to verify the status of factive islands in Italian, based on original experimental data. Moreover, since island effects have been generally tested against wh-extractions, a secondary goal of the present study is to verify whether other types of A’-movement, such as Focus fronting, can be restricted by island effects as well. The results obtained from two experimental tests, carried out with the collaboration of a total of 310 informants, provide evidence that Italian factive islands seem to lie somewhere between strong and weak islands, qualifying as a sort of ‘intermediate’ island. Indeed, direct objects appear to be less constrained than subjects, indirect objects and adjuncts. Furthermore, the extraction of a Focus constituent from a factive complement lowers the acceptability of the sentence, thus indicating that (factive) islands are indeed sensible to Focus fronting

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

Dislocations and framings

This chapter provides a formal and pragmatic characterization of dislocation and framing, based on a comparative analysis of Romance languages. Given their shared quality as non-operator A΄-dependencies, dislocated constituents and framesetters are both treated as instances of topicalization and distinguished in terms of “sentence topics” and “limiting topics”, respectively. A typology of topics is then proposed, showing the correlation between discourse functions, prosodic properties and dedicated positions in the C-domain. In particular, sentence and limiting topics are illustrated and confronted for their intonational contours, morpho-syntactic properties (such as reconstruction, minimality and WCO effects), derivation, position in the functional array and role in the conversational dynamics. Attention is also paid to clitic resumption and a comparison with another type of dislocation, namely marginalization, is proposed. Based on naturalistic data and interpretive judgments, evidence is provided that framing must be kept distinct from dislocation and forms an independent discourse category

The interpretation of pro in consistent and partial NS languages: A comparative interface analysis.

This paper deals with the acceptability and interpretation of referential null subjects (NS) and compares consistent pro-drop in Italian with equivalent sentences in Finnish (a partial NS language), in different syntactic constructions (matrix, completive, factive and adverbial clauses). This leads to the formulation of an original proposal that opens new perspectives for future research. Specifically, based on the interpretive judgments of 273 native speakers of Finnish, it is shown that a Topic chain analysis (Frascarelli 2007) can (and should) be assumed in partial NS languages as well, and that ‘partiality’ cannot be explained through narrow syntactic constraints. The Locality requirement is thus re-proposed as an Interface Visibility Condition (IVC), according to which in partial NS languages a pro is preferably interpreted as referring to the closest overt link in a Topic chain. The Topic Criterion is thus proposed as a Macroparameter of NS languages and the necessity of a ‘graded analysis’ ascribed to the IVC (as a Mesoparameter)

Interfacce e teoria della grammatica: l’articolazione della struttura in ‘zone’

In questo lavoro si illustra, seppur brevemente, il modo in cui il concetto di interfaccia si concretizza all’interno del quadro teorico formale offerto dalla GG. In questa prospettiva, l’interazione tra i vari livelli della grammatica si realizza mediante l’intervento essenziale della sintassi, componente generativo del linguaggio. Tale relazione non si realizza ‘tutta insieme’ e indiscriminatamente e la suddivisione della struttura frasale in ‘zone sintattiche’ consente di visualizzare la porzione sintagmatica che si interfaccia, in seguito ad Inserzione Lessicale, con la semantica lessicale, la morfologia di tipo flessivo e la grammatica del discorso, evidenziandone priorità gerarchica e correlazioni. Un sistema così delineato mette in luce la relazione tra struttura profonda, struttura superficiale e pragmatica e consente di fare predizioni importanti sul funzionamento del sistema-lingua