This paper discusses the fronting of a focal constituent to a clauseinitial position which, in various languages, is associated with an import of unexpectedness. We provide prosodic and syntactic evidence from Italian showing that this phenomenon has distinctive grammatical properties with respect to other instances of "focus fronting". We argue that the fronted constituent bears narrow focus, and that the unexpectedness import conveys that the asserted proposition is less likely than one or more distinct focus alternatives (see Grosz 2011). We characterize this import as a conventional implicature, and we argue that likelihood is interpreted with respect to an informative modal base which is shared by the conversational community (the context set). We show that the unexpectedness import expressed by a speaker can be accepted or rejected by the other discourse participants: thus, it qualifies as an evaluative commitment of the speaker and, when accepted by the interlocutors, it can give rise to a shared evaluation.

The analysis of the left periphery was one of the first topics of the research program referred to as “the cartography of syntactic structures.” This program is based on the observation that syntactic representations are complex structures consisting of sequences of hierarchically organized functional elements. Drawing detailed maps of such structures has been shown to have valuable heuristic power in the investigation of how syntactic structures interact with principles constraining syntactic computations and the interfaces with sound and meaning. The study of the left periphery has been extensively pursued in the last years. The strategy initially adopted, in the mid 1990s, has been to analyze in great detail the left periphery in a language, Italian; then, the initial map based on Italian was used as a benchmark for comparative analyses, starting the comparison with closely related languages, and progressively extending it to typologically and historically distant languages. In this case study we retrace this development, starting from the initial map based on Italian, in the context of the early cartographic studies. We then move to extensions and modifications, addressing specific points in which the cross‐linguistic evidence has played a key role. We dwell on the criterial approach, according to which the left periphery of the clause is populated by a sequence of functional heads (Top, Foc, Q, etc.) attracting phrases with matching features, and guiding the interpretation of such configurations at the interfaces with sound and meaning. We subsequently address some interpretive properties of topic and focus structures at the interfaces in connection with the assignment of the prosodic properties and the proper use in discourse. The case study concludes with a discussion of the parametrizations which must be assumed and of the prospects of tracing back the observed properties to deeper explanatory principles of syntactic computation.

Italian shows large phonetic and prosodic variations that depend on the geographical and dialectal area the speakers come from. The chapter explicitly focuses on the intonational variation occurring in Italian and offers (1) the key elements of a shared transcription system able to take this into account and (2) an overview of the intonation patterns of thirteen varieties, spoken in cities and towns located in various areas of the Italian peninsula, i.e. Milan, Turin, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Rome, Pescara, Naples, Salerno, Cosenza, Bari, and Lecce. The main novelty of the chapter is the clear and explicit effort made in offering analyses and transcriptions that always keep in mind cross-variety comparison to finally facilitate cross-language comparison as well. Importantly, this is the first work on Italian in which this is systematically achieved on the basis of a wide and representative set of sentence types, apart from the number of varieties considered.

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