When right dislocation meets the left-periphery

This study investigates the syntactic status of post-focus constituents in Italian, examining their properties with respect to binding, negative polarity licensing, clitic resumption, wh-extraction, and fragmental answers among others. All these properties converge in showing that post focus constituents are right-dislocated outside the main clause, against the clause-internal analyses à la Cecchetto. This result is used to show that Italian contrastive focus, including its clause-initial and clause-internal instances, always occurs rightmost in a sentence modulo right dislocation. The properties of post-focus constituents are also shown to be incompatible with a left-peripheral analysis of Italian focus à la Rizzi, strongly supporting a focus-less split-CP.