This paper offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis of French and Italian wh-in situ questions based on spontaneous spoken data. A pragmatic analysis relying on two parameters, propositional activation and pragmatic functions, reveals that the licensing conditions and the use of this structure largely differ in the two languages. While French wh-in situ do not require an activated proposition and can introduce a discourse-new topic, Italian wh-in situ mostly require an activated proposition and, at least in the analyzed corpus data, do not introduce discourse-new topics. An examination of the context also reveals that the different licensing conditions influence the interactional uses of these questions. All in all, both French and Italian wh-in situ require a pragmatic condition, which is their ‘anchoring’ to given, or at least inferable, information in the linguistic context (as is typical of Italian) or to predictable situations in the extralinguistic context (such as expected discourse moves in social interactions, as is the case for French).

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Form and frequency of Italian Cleft constructions in a corpus of electronic news A contrastive perspective with French, Spanish, German and English * The research presented in this paper has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project PP00P1-133716/1, Italian Constituent Order in a Contrastive Perspective, in short ICOCP). The order of presentation of the authors is motivated as follows: the paper has been written by A.-M. De Cesare, PI of the SNSF project; Davide Garassino has translated and glossed most of the examples; overall, the results presented here are based on the research of all the members of the ICOCP research project mentioned in the title. Collectively, we would like to thank Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga for her insights and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 1 The contrastive analysis between Italian and the other languages will be further developed in the following single-authored articles of the first part of the volume, each of which is devoted to a particular Cleft construction type. More references about the languages we take into account here, i.e. Italian, French, Spanish, English and German, will also be provided in the other chapters included in this volume. 2 In this paper, we focus only on these forms of clefts because they are amongst the most frequent and standard, and because their cross-linguistic distribution in different language variet

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The goal of the paper is to shed new light on the semantics and pragmatics of cleft sentences by discussing the exhaustive interpretation typically associated with these complex syntactic structures. Based on a fine-grained analysis of the contexts in which "exhaustiveness" can be cancelled as well as reinforced by English also and only and Italian anche and solo, we claim that this meaning component associated with clefts in English and Italian is best accounted for in terms of a conventionalized conversational implicature. Our analysis is based on a corpus of authentic cleft occurrences collected from different written sources.

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