In this work we consider Italian special questions expressing surprise and question-exclamatives expressing surprise-disapproval. Both sentence types are introduced by the adversative particle ma. In order to better understand the role of prosody and gesture in these structures with respect to syntax, we run some experiments of sentence production and sentence elicitation. The results point to an integrated model of the three components: syntax prosody and gestures. We will show in fact that the appropriate prosody and gesture are triggered by a dedicated projection in the syntactic structure, which is read off at the interface with the sensorimotor component.
This paper investigates the roles of focus, arguing that such a notion is too wide and can be applied to several phenomena. I show that focus needs to be further specified for (at least) another feature and is therefore made of smaller primitive traits. These can combine to create bundles of features, which give rise to the several types of foci we know. Moreover, these features are subject to parametrization and can thus account for cross-linguistic differences.
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