Should I stay or should I go? Optional focus movement in Italian

This paper discusses the fronting of a focus constituent in Italian. We provide experimental evidence showing that fronting is allowed when the focus structure has a corrective import (correcting a previous assertion: contrast across utterances), whereas it is not allowed when the focus is merely contrastive within a single utterance. This leads to a refinement of the notion of 'contrastive focus' ; we also discuss the problem of the apparent optionality of fronting the focus constituent in a corrective claim.