Revisiting the cartography of (Italian) postverbal subjects from different angles with reference to canonicality considerations.

The article revisits some previous results from different Italian speaking populations (adult L1, adult L2, heritage, attrited, developing monolingual children) on the acquisition of the VS order in new information focus contexts and with unaccusatives verbs. It is shown that the same word order corresponds to different discourse values and its availability varies depending on the lexical class to which the verb belongs, with unaccusatives and indefinite postverbal subjects singled out in the different populations investigated. It is also shown that in the same question-answer context the postverbal subject can act as the focus of new information only when it is a full argument cartographically analyzed in the specifier of the clause internal low focus position, once again singling out the postverbal subject of unaccusatives. These results suggest some reflections to the effect that both the SV and VS order can be considered canonical in their own respects, once different discourse values and lexical properties of the verb are taken into account.