Focus in Existential Sentences (2012)

Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 2018

Constructions that are typically used to introduce a new referent into the discourse may extend this function so as to introduce a new event or situation. In this paper, I examine the case of presentational ci-sentences in Ital-ian, which have developed exactly this new function out of existential sentences. Despite being superficially similar to existential sentences, as well as to clefts, presentational ci-sentences must be kept separate from both sentence types, and must be treated as an independent construction with distinct structural and functional properties. Unlike existentials, presentational ci-sentences assert the existence of an event or situation and involve a predi-cational structure characterized by a CP (the relative clause) that functions as the predicate of the DP. Unlike clefts, which are typically used to mark narrow focus, presentational ci-sentences display a sentence-focus structure whereby the event is presented as all new. A contrastive analysis of presenta-tional ci-sentences against existentials and clefts will thus allow us not only to understand the exact boundaries between these constructions, but also to identify more precisely the distinctive characteristic properties of each sentence type.

The most comprehensive study to date of Italian contrastive focalization, Right Dislocation, Left Dislocation, and Destressing in Situ. Provides scholars with the analytical tools to accurately determine which linguistic effects pertain to focalization and which to discourse givenness. Presents new empirical arguments and data. Most data are supplied together with the discourse context in which they were elicited.

2015

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. List of figures and tables viii List of abbreviations ix Dialect maps xiii 1 Existentials and locatives in Romance dialects of Italy: Introduction Delia Bentley 1.1 An overview of existentials and other there sentences 1.1.1 Existentials: Romance and beyond 1.2 Scope and objectives of the volume 1.3 Authorship, methodology, theoretical underpinnings of the research 1.3.1 The Manchester projects on existential constructions 1.3.2 Role and Reference Grammar 1.4 Acknowledgements 1.5 Outline of the volume 2 Focus structure Silvio Cruschina 2.1 Introduction 2.1.1 The notions of focus and topic 2.1

The main goal of the present paper is twofold: on the one hand, to highlight the patterns of variation among the existential constructions found in Italo-Romance; on the other, to examine the observed microvariation in a comparative perspective in order to identify common properties and general tendencies. Starting from a description of the variation concerning the primary components of existentials, I demonstrate that, irrespective of the superficial morphosyntactic variation attested, all Italo-Romance existential constructions share a fundamental property: their distinguishing features can all be viewed as the reflection of the persistence of formal properties continuing or overlapping with a source construction. This construction is either the locative predication, when be is selected, or the possessive structure, when the existential copula is have. The pivot of the existential construction therefore shows typical properties of arguments, but is however subject to a high degree of instability and variation because it has been semantically reanalysed as the predicate of an abstract contextual domain serving as the argument of the existential proposition. This mismatch between the syntactic and the semantic characteristics of existential structures contributes to the microvariation encountered.

The main aim of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of particular structures found in Italian, especially as spoken in central and southern Italy, and in Sicilian. These structures are very similar in the two languages, in that they involve the grammaticalization of the same verb of saying or epistemic adjective followed by the complementizer (cf. Italian dice che, capace che, and Sicilian dicica, capacica), but in fact they display different properties. I investigate the function and the syntactic behaviour of these constructions, which seem to instantiate two types, stages or degrees of grammaticalization. More specifically , I show that in Italian these predicates are functional heads followed by the complementizer che, while in Sicilian the resulting units are now sentence adverbs. The present work therefore deals with grammaticalization and language change, but also with the two categories with which these structures are associated , namely, evidentiality and epistemic modality. A broader theoretical question lies in the background of the discussion, which challenges the 'morphocen-tric' perspective on the grammatical expression of certain categories such as evidentiality (cf. Aikhenvald 2004). Following Cinque (1999, 2004), I claim that adverbs can also be seen as the overt manifestation of functional distinctions, similarly to particles, auxiliaries and overt morphology. Under this view, senten-tial adverbs are functional in nature, and have the same meaning and function as the corresponding grammatical elements occurring as the head of the corresponding functional projection.

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2017

This paper discusses the semantics of O(bject) omission with divalent verbs in Italian, in relation to (i) the interplay of the inherent and structural aspects of verb meaning with the degree of thematic specification of the subject (i.e., agentivity/control); (ii) the inherent characteristics of the O argument (e.g., animacy); (iii) the degree of semantic implication between the verb and O; (iv) the role played by the linguistic and extra-linguistic context. It is shown that object omission in Italian is highly sensitive to the event structure template of verbs (e.g., the low degree of aspectual specification of verbs) and the elements of meaning lexicalized in the verb, interacting, in turn, with other semantic and discoursepragmatic parameters. Whereas the constraints on Indefinite Null Instantiation appear to be similar to those at work in other languages (e.g, English and French), those applying to Definite Null Instantiation display more variability.

2019

2013

"In this paper I show that the extraposition of restrictive relatives in Italian differs from English in that (i) extraposition is only possible when the relative head is indefinite, (ii) extraposition is impossible from the preverbal subject position. I propose an analysis of the Italian data based on the idea that the indefinite head and the extraposed relative are interpreted by the rule of Predicate Restriction proposed by Chung & Ladusaw (2005). The indefinite head fails to saturate the argument position that it occupies: this allows the extraposed relative to further restrict the same argument position, which is then bound by VP-level Existential Closure. Extraposition is impossible from preverbal subjects because in Italian, these fail to be reconstructed into VP, within the scope of Existential Closure. The comparison of English and Italian suggests that relative clause extraposition is not a unitary phenomenon at the cross-linguistic level."

Essays on Language Function and Language Type, 1997

It is a commonly held view that, in the absence of an overt locative or temporal phrase, broad focus subject inversion in Romance requires a null locative in preverbal position, thus being comparable to locative inversion (Benincà 1988 and subsequent work). The (in)compatibility of a number of verbs and verb classes with this construction, however, has not yet received a principled explanation. Analysing the event structure of the predicates that occur in bare broad focus subject inversion in Italian, we argue that this construction requires a covert Subject of Predication, and this requirement can be satisfied by a thematic goal argument of the verb or a non-thematic situational argument that is inferred when a bounded eventuality is predicated. We explain which predicates take which type of Subject of Predication, and we make falsifiable predictions on the relative compatibility of different verb classes with the construction under investigation. Our predictions are cogent in the null-subject SVO languages that allow broad focus in VS order and rule it out in VOS/VSO order (Leonetti 2017). With our study, we shed light on the lexical-semantic underpinnings of this restriction. Following Bianchi (1993) and Bianchi & Chesi (2014), we propose that this is a thetic construction, in which the postverbal DP remains in its first-merged thematic position. In our analysis, the silent Subject of Predication takes Cardinaletti's (2004) SubjP position, satisfying Rizzi's (2005) Subject Criterion.