The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery

New Insights on the Question Particle "a" in Sardinian

“…We will see that besides the structure in (1), there are several other syntactic strategies that the speakers can choose to form yes/no questions and that most of them are somehow related to focus. Section 3 introduces the state of the art of the analysis of the question particle a. I show that this particle is also related to focus, and I support some preceding analyses that localize a in Rizzi's (1997) FocP. At the end of this section, I argue that the presence of clitic dislocation phenomena, in particular CLRD, are obligatory with DPs that occur in interrogatives introduced by the question particle a The data stemming from the ASIt interviews (see Section 2, in particular Note 3) and from other inquiries I have done have been standardized using the orthographic conventions of the Limba Sarda Comuna (= LSC, cf.…”

Information structure and its syntactic manifestation in Spanish: facts and proposals

“…Familiarity Vitoria, not want.1sg know more of that city 'Vitoria, I don't want to know more about that city' (73 Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl's (2007) contribution is the claim that these three semantic interpretations of topics are ordered hierarchically. In other words: against the initial stages of the cartographic study of the left periphery, where topic was an iterable position (Rizzi 1997), F&H claim that indeed there is more than one position for topics, but each one of them corresponds to distinct heads in the functional sequence, in accordance with the cartographic idea that each head has only one place where it an appear due to its specialised semantics. Their proposal is that the order is Aboutness > Contrastive > Familiarity.…”

“…The information focus simply involves non-presupposed information in the clause; as for contrastive focus, it involves picking a set (possibly a singleton) and opposing it to another set. The claim is that focalisation, the operation that dislocates a focal element to the left of the clause, is associated to contrastive focus (Rizzi 1997, Belletti 2001, López 2009), in the sense that a focalised element must be contrastive, while a nonfocalised element may, but does not need to, be contrastive.…”

“…The second option is generally associated to cartographic frameworks, where there is a proliferation of heads that are, in principle, rigidly (and universally) ordered. The main proponent of this view for complementiser phenomena is Rizzi (1997), and has been developed in a number of proposals, some of them by Rizzi himself (cf. Rizzi 2004, for instance), some by others (Haegeman 2011).…”

“…Rizzi 2004, for instance), some by others (Haegeman 2011). (8) represents the proposal in Rizzi (1997), while (9) represents the proposal of Haegeman (2006). Fin(initeness) is the head responsible for determining whether the clause is finite or non-finite, as well as some properties of subjunctive and the coreference of subjects (Giorgi 2009).…”