Current Issues in Italian, Romance and Germanic Non-canonical Word Orders

•     The paper of Manuel Leonetti analyzes non-focal fronting in Italian and Spanish, i.e., cases in which the fronted constituent is neither associated with a Focus nor with a sentence Topic. Based on spoken data taken from the C-ORAL-ROM corpus and Old Italian, he argues that the limited productivity of non-focus fronting in Italian compared to Spanish is related to a deeper asymmetry in the syntactic expression of information structure in these languages. While the central Romance languages, such as Italian, opt for maximally transparent information-structural partitions (between Topic-Comment and Focus-Background), Spanish, together with Portuguese and Romanian, allows for non-canonical word orders without informational partitioning. In the former group of languages, non-focal fronting is thus rare and restricted to a few negative and weak indefinite quantifiers.

•     The contribution by Lunella Mereu is devoted to the information status of obliques occurring in clause initial position. It shows that these constituents can be associated not only with the information function of Topic, but also of Focus. On the basis of a corpus of spoken Italian, the paper then describes different types of focused obliques in initial position. Finally, an analysis of the prosodic properties of obliques occurring in different syntactic positions enables the author to present a new principle governing the relation between a syntactic sequence and the information status of constituents within the sentence.

•     Valeria Buttini studies the English and French translations of a contemporary Italian novel (Io non ho paura by Niccolò Ammaniti) searching for the translation equivalents of Italian left dislocation. Her inquiry reveals the existence of important differences in the frequency, the status (especially in respect to the diamesic specialization) and the discourse-pragmatic functions associated with this structure in the three languages examined. In particular, in the French translation, in contrast to the Italian orginal, left dislocations are more frequent in the mimetic than in the diegetic parts of the texts, which suggests that these structures are perceived as more typical of the spoken language. Moreover, left dislocations express a contrast more often in French than in Italian. In the English version, on the other hand, left dislocations are avoided; Buttini claims that their use mainly depends on stylistic factors.

•     Fabio Rossi’s contribution is devoted to Italian right dislocation and provides new insights on this non-canonical word order from various points of view. First, in contrast to most of the research available so far, which focuses on the analysis of spoken Italian, his interest lies in written texts (mainly drawn from corpora of newspapers and contemporary novels). Second, he compares the frequency of right dislocation based on a specific set of verbs – vedere ‘to see’, sentire ‘to hear’ and sapere ‘to know’ – and shows that right dislocation is more frequent than left dislocation in contemporary novels; this phenomenon can partly be explained on the basis of the high grammaticalization degree of the syntactic structures analyzed. Third, he describes the discourse functions performed by right dislocations in written texts, claryfing the function generically called ‘expressive’ and highlighting that these constructions play an important role in text organization as they also function as cohesive devices.

•     Davide Garassino tackles the similarities and differences in the use of Italian and English cleft sentences on the basis of a comparable corpus of online newspapers (the ICOCP corpus). He proposes a probabilistic approach to the study of clefts whose aim is to determine the relative “weight” of several syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors influencing the occurrence of clefts in both languages. His results show that the main differences between Italian and English clefts are pragmatic and concern the information status of the cleft constituent and the discourse function of the structure. These observations point to a clear functional specialization of cleft sentences in the two languages: While Italian clefts are preferably used as cohesive devices with a Given-New information structure, English clefts are more frequently used for highlighting a discourse-new cleft constituent that often conveys a contrastive-corrective value.

•     Ada Valentini analyzes a special form of cleft sentence typical of Italian, the so-called frase scissa temporale or spuria (temporal or spurious cleft sentence). Her goal is to discuss the semantic and pragmatic status of this construction within the family of cleft sentences, showing its discourse-pragmatic functions and possible translation equivalents in English based on data drawn from the EUROPARL corpus. In her view, Italian temporal clefts belong to the family of cleft constructions since the temporal cleft constituent can bear focus as the English translations show; regardless of the form used for translating this structure (i.e., both clefts and non-cleft constructions), the Italian temporal cleft constituent corresponds to a focal element in English. From a pragmatic point of view, temporal clefts are mainly characterized by a Given-New information structure (although other information articulations such as New-Given are far from being uncommon) and are often used for expressing specific hearer’s / reader’s expectations in discourse.