This volume includes contributions offering up-to-date analyses of non-canonical word orders (fronting, inversion, dislocations, and cleft constructions) in Italian and in Italian in a contrastive perspective with other Romance and/or Germanic languages. All studies rely on a strong empirical basis. This volume aims at offering an up-to-date survey on non-canonical word orders and their interplay with information structure and discourse organization. The contributions analyze different non-canonical syntactic structures (fronting, inversion, dislocations, and cleft constructions), focusing on Italian alone or on Italian in a contrastive perspective with one or more Romance (French, Romanian, Portuguese, Spanish) and/or Germanic (English and German) languages. The authors tackle the main issue of the volume from a variety of perspectives and by relying on different theoretical frameworks. At the same time, they all offer a fine-grained description of the structures analyzed on the basis of a solid empirical foundation. Contents: Manuel Leonetti: On Non-Focal Fronting in Italian and Spanish Lunella Mereu: Obliques and the initial syntactic position Dieter Vermandere/Karen Lahousse: Verb-subject inversion in Romance; the other way round Valeria Buttini: I am (not) scared of left dislocations. The rendering of the structure in the French and English translations of Niccolo Ammanitis novel I am not scared Fabio Rossi: La dislocazione a destra nellitaliano scritto: rilievi statistici, pragmatici e sintattici Barbara Wehr: Some remarks on different classifications of cleft constructions and their areal distribution Davide Garassino: Using cleft sentences in Italian and English. A multifactorial analysis Ada Valentini: Signor Presidente, sono due anni che aspettiamo: la scissa durativa italiana in un confronto interlinguistico sul corpus multilingue EUROPARL Alessandro Panunzi: Pseudocleft Sentences in Spoken Italian. Syntax, Semantics, Information Structure, and a Comparison with Spanish. Anna-Maria De Cesare is currently Assistant Professor and Professor of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Basel (Section of Italian Linguistics).
Davide Garassino is currently Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich (Institute of Romance Studies).
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