The interaction of focus, givenness, and prosody : a study of Italian clause structure /
This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse-given phrases. Vieri Samek-Lodovici disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focaliz...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Language Notes: | English. |
| Published: |
Oxford :
Oxford University Press,
2015.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Series: | Oxford studies in theoretical linguistics ;
57. |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This book provides an in-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian, showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse-given phrases. Vieri Samek-Lodovici disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by highly productive operations affecting discourse given phrases in Italian, namely right dislocation and marginalization. Based on a vast aggregate of evidence, he shows that in the default case contrastive focalization occurs in situ and that left-peripheral focalization patterns arise from the interaction with right dislocation and generalize well beyond the familiar cases examined in Rizzi (1997) and most literature since. In the final chapter, the author examines how the key properties unveiled in the previous sections, such as focalization in situ, follow from the prosodic constraints governing stress placement, thus reinterpreting and extending Zubizarreta's (1998) insight about the role of prosody in shaping syntax. Overall, the book offers an evidence-backed radical departure from current views of focalization proposing a high, fixed, focus projection at the left periphery of the clause. It also provides the most comprehensive study of Italian marginalization and right dislocation available to date. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xv, 332 pages ). |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 314-326) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780191801457 0191801453 9780191057830 0191057835 |