AV短视频

In most Romance languages the focus of an utterance bearing the main prosodic prominence may be displaced to the left periphery of the sentence through a syntactic operation known as Focus Fronting (FF). Not all types of focus allow FF, though. Rather, the presence or absence of this special syntactic device to mark narrow focus seems to depend on additional or concomitant requirements, leading to a wide range of analyses which adopt different views on the syntactic, prosodic, or pragmatic nature of the trigger of this operation. It is generally acknowledged that contrast is the interpretive feature associated with FF in Romance, to the extent that in many analyses this is considered to be a necessary requirement for FF to obtain (López 2009; see also Rizzi 1997). A different analysis is put forward in Samek-Lodovici (2006), according to which the initial trigger of the derivational steps that lead to the FF configuration is the givenness of the superficially postfocal material. Recent work, however, has highlighted that FF is not exclusively limited to contrastive interpretations, and that givenness of the background material is not a necessary condition for FF (cf. Cruschina 2012, Bianchi, Bocci, and Cruschina 2014a,b). Among the Romance languages, Sardinian and Sicilian stand out for admitting FF with information focus (e.g. answers to questions). FF is also possible with an interpretation of surprise or unexpectedness (i.e. mirative focus) in Sicilian, in Sardinian, and in Italian and – arguably – in other Romance varieties such as Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, and French (cf. Cruschina 2012, Remberger in press).

In this presentation, I will give an overview of the recent findings and hypotheses on the interpretive properties associated with FF in Romance, distinguishing between different types of focus (information focus, contrastive/corrective focus, and mirative focus). Following Bianchi, Bocci, and Cruschina (2014a,b), and concentrating on Italian, I will then show that the possibility of having FF with mirative focus goes against the traditional theories of FF based on the notion of contrast or givenness, and that ultimately FF must be analysed as triggered by conventional implicatures. FF with mirative focus, for instance, conveys the conventional implicature that there is at least one alternative proposition which is more likely than the asserted proposition (with respect to a contextually relevant modal base and a stereotypical ordering source). This implicature gives rise to a series of pragmatic effects that are generally described in terms of surprise and unexpectedness. I will finally discuss two possible syntactic implementations of this idea: one that involves that postulation of distinct functional projections for different focus types, and the other that requires the syntacticization of conventional implicatures and their association with focus structures.

References

Bianchi, Valentina, Giuliano Bocci and Silvio Cruschina (2014a). ‘Focus fronting and its implicatures’. Ms, submitted.

Bianchi, Valentina, Giuliano Bocci and Silvio Cruschina (2014b). ‘Focus fronting, unexpectedness, and the evaluative dimension’. Ms, submitted.

Cruschina, Silvio (2012). Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections. OUP.

López, Luís (2009). A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure. Oxford: OUP.

Remberger, Eva-Maria (in press). ‘A comparative look at Focus Fronting in Romance’.In: Andreas Dufter & Àlvaro Octavio Toledo y Huerta (eds.), 383-418.Left Sentence Peripheries in Spanish.Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Rizzi, Luigi (1997). ‘The fine structure of the left periphery’. In Elements of grammar. Handbook in generative syntax, Liliane Haegeman (ed.), 281-337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.