<i>Intonazione contrastiva e strutture di base</i>

Abstract

In this paper, it is suggested that, in Italian, sentence initial Focus can have a new information Focus interpretation rather than a contrastive one, contrary to general assumptions in recent literature. By considering contrastive stress as a prosodic feature bearing no relation to syntax, we gain important theoretical advantages in terms of simplicity. The applicability of contrastive stress to Clitic Left Dislocation contructions (Benincà [2001], among others) is a starting point here to argue that contrastive Focus too could arise from the mere application of contrastive stress to a new information Focus that keeps its syntactico-semantic properties unchanged: the constituent bearing contrastive stress inherits from the replaced constituent the function played by the latter in the assertion structure of the sentence.