Among languages that employ specialized particles for answering polar questions, two major groups are known: Positive-Negative (P-N) and Agreement-Disagreement (A-D). English and Italian are examples of the former group, Japanese an example of the latter. It has occasionally been remarked in the literature that at least in some P-N languages a narrow focus in a negative polar question affects the choice of responding particles: namely, the answering pattern shifts to A-D. In the present contribution, this claim is thoroughly tested experimentally with two forced choice experiments that investigate the choice of responding particles in answers to Italian negative polar questions both with and without narrow foci. Our results bring clear support to the claim of the exceptional answering pattern to negative polar questions with narrow foci. Two candidate accounts are presented, in accord with the two main current lines of research on responding particles: an ellipsis account and an anaphoric account. In both cases, we will argue that a crucial role is played by the interaction of the narrow focus with sentential negation in the questions.

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This chapter surveys a range of secondary source phenomena in the sense of Collins and Postal (2012) that are attested in Italian. It shows that while some classes of secondary sources (camouflage expressions, partitives, and subjects of predicative nominals in some idiolects and registers) pattern with their English counterparts in allowing non-third person agreement, in imposters this holds only of two items (il/la sottoscritto/a and il/la qui presente) that share some kind of participial morphology. This restriction is credited to a language specific constraint that interferes with the more liberal agreement system articulated by Collins and Postal (2012).