The study of Information Structure (IS) and syntactic structure in Romance within the generative paradigm started in the 1970s with articles dealing with pragmatically marked constructions on the left edge of the clause (cf. Cinque 1977, on left dislocation; Benincà 1988; Cinque 1990 on various constructions). The right edge of the sentence was first explored by Antinucci and Cinque (1977). The first Romance language to be thoroughly investigated was Italian, which provided the basis for future work already at the end of the 1970s in Cinque (1977). Since then, other Romance languages, such as Spanish, French, European and Brazilian Portuguese, but also Sardinian, Rhaeto-Romance, and non-standard varieties, have been investigated.1 The seminal article by Rizzi (1997) on the fine structure of CP, the Left Periphery, has again put Italian in the foreground and opened the Cartographic project (Aboh, this volume); it provided a general frame into which most of the detailed observations made in previous work could be systematized. On the other hand, the syntactic point of view has been complemented by work done on other related issues such as the prosody of different types of informationally marked constructions in French (Doetjes et al. 2002; Delais-Roussarie et al. 2004), in Spanish (see among others Zubizarreta 1998, this volume), in Italian (Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl 2007; Bianchi and Frascarelli 2010), and European Portuguese (Frota 2000). More recently, work on the ‘right edge’ has been made by Belletti (2004, 2009), López (2009), and Villalba (2009) for Catalan, Martins (2013) for European Portuguese, among others. There is general consensus on the fact that IS-relevant information is encoded in Romance at the left and right edges of the clause. The majority of the authors analyse the left edge as left peripheral positions to the clause. Another general observation is the fact that several elements can be stacked in the left and right peripheries, some of them display rigid orders, others do not and can be iterated and/or switched with other elements. It seems that in Romance there is no one-to-one correspondence between pragmatic import and syntactic properties. It is also clear that in all Romance languages investigated so far the two peripheries are similar but not com- pletely overlapping, neither from the syntactic nor from the informational point of view. In this chapter, we first provide an empirical description of the left edge of the clause (in Section 32.2) and then the right edge (in Section 32.3). In Section 32.4, we briefly discuss some general prosodic aspects of Romance and the prosodic marking of information structure and marked word orders. Section 32.5 constitutes a brief outline of different ‘families’ of syntactic and prosodic approaches to the problem. The phenomena we discuss in this chapter are intended to provide an overview of the most representative and theoretically relevant phenomena, and cannot be exhaustive for reasons of space. We are well aware of the fact that it is not possible to cover all the material produced on Romance in various theoretical frameworks in one single chapter, especially if the non-European varieties like Brazilian Portuguese, Southern American Spanish, Quebec French, and the French varieties spoken in the former French colonies in Africa are taken into account, not to mention creoles. Therefore, we have selected those constructions with specific theoretical import, leaving out others, for instance all bi-clausal constructions such as pseudo-clefts and cleft-sentences are not systematically treated here.

Poletto, C., Bocci, G. (2016). Syntactic and prosodic effects of information structure in romance. In C. Féry, S. Ishihara (a cura di), The Oxford Handbook of information structure (pp. 642-662). Oxford : Oxford University Press [10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.14].

Syntactic and prosodic effects of information structure in romance

Bocci, Giuliano
2016-01-01

Abstract

The study of Information Structure (IS) and syntactic structure in Romance within the generative paradigm started in the 1970s with articles dealing with pragmatically marked constructions on the left edge of the clause (cf. Cinque 1977, on left dislocation; Benincà 1988; Cinque 1990 on various constructions). The right edge of the sentence was first explored by Antinucci and Cinque (1977). The first Romance language to be thoroughly investigated was Italian, which provided the basis for future work already at the end of the 1970s in Cinque (1977). Since then, other Romance languages, such as Spanish, French, European and Brazilian Portuguese, but also Sardinian, Rhaeto-Romance, and non-standard varieties, have been investigated.1 The seminal article by Rizzi (1997) on the fine structure of CP, the Left Periphery, has again put Italian in the foreground and opened the Cartographic project (Aboh, this volume); it provided a general frame into which most of the detailed observations made in previous work could be systematized. On the other hand, the syntactic point of view has been complemented by work done on other related issues such as the prosody of different types of informationally marked constructions in French (Doetjes et al. 2002; Delais-Roussarie et al. 2004), in Spanish (see among others Zubizarreta 1998, this volume), in Italian (Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl 2007; Bianchi and Frascarelli 2010), and European Portuguese (Frota 2000). More recently, work on the ‘right edge’ has been made by Belletti (2004, 2009), López (2009), and Villalba (2009) for Catalan, Martins (2013) for European Portuguese, among others. There is general consensus on the fact that IS-relevant information is encoded in Romance at the left and right edges of the clause. The majority of the authors analyse the left edge as left peripheral positions to the clause. Another general observation is the fact that several elements can be stacked in the left and right peripheries, some of them display rigid orders, others do not and can be iterated and/or switched with other elements. It seems that in Romance there is no one-to-one correspondence between pragmatic import and syntactic properties. It is also clear that in all Romance languages investigated so far the two peripheries are similar but not com- pletely overlapping, neither from the syntactic nor from the informational point of view. In this chapter, we first provide an empirical description of the left edge of the clause (in Section 32.2) and then the right edge (in Section 32.3). In Section 32.4, we briefly discuss some general prosodic aspects of Romance and the prosodic marking of information structure and marked word orders. Section 32.5 constitutes a brief outline of different ‘families’ of syntactic and prosodic approaches to the problem. The phenomena we discuss in this chapter are intended to provide an overview of the most representative and theoretically relevant phenomena, and cannot be exhaustive for reasons of space. We are well aware of the fact that it is not possible to cover all the material produced on Romance in various theoretical frameworks in one single chapter, especially if the non-European varieties like Brazilian Portuguese, Southern American Spanish, Quebec French, and the French varieties spoken in the former French colonies in Africa are taken into account, not to mention creoles. Therefore, we have selected those constructions with specific theoretical import, leaving out others, for instance all bi-clausal constructions such as pseudo-clefts and cleft-sentences are not systematically treated here.
2016
9780199642670
Poletto, C., Bocci, G. (2016). Syntactic and prosodic effects of information structure in romance. In C. Féry, S. Ishihara (a cura di), The Oxford Handbook of information structure (pp. 642-662). Oxford : Oxford University Press [10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199642670.013.14].
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11365/1083152