Verb-subject order in Italian: an investigation of short announcements and telecast news

Bernini, Giuliano

doi:10.1524/stuf.1995.48.12.44

Cited by 2 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…(15), and the PC, e.g. ( 16), are the most prominent and most wellstudied (Bernini 1995;Berretta 1995;Ward 1999;Venier 2002;Fiorentino 2005;Meulleman 2012;Cruschina 2012Cruschina , 2015Cruschina , 2018. Among these three constructions the SIC and the PC can in almost all instances be said to constitute a pair of alternating constructions, e.g.…”

Section: An Overview Of the Constructions Involvedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The SIC has been widely recognized as one of the most prominent thetic and sentence-focus constructions in Italian and has been intensively studied both with regard to its morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics (Blumenthal 1980;Wandruszka 1981Wandruszka , 1982Lambrecht 1994;Bernini 1995;Berretta 1995;Cennamo 1995;Sasse 1995;Sornicola 1995;Lambrecht 2000;Venier 2002;Belletti 2004;Bonvino 2005;Fiorentino 2005 (Wandruszka 1981(Wandruszka , 1982Bernini 1995;Berretta 1995). Furthermore, a strong correlation between the occurrence of a postverbal subject and the class of unaccusative verbs has been found, albeit a far from absolute one (Bernini 1995;Sornicola 1995). In fact, also unergative verbs, e.g.…”

Section: The Syntactic Inversion Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the SIC and the PC are among the most prominent thetic and sentencefocus constructions to be found in Italian, there have hitherto been several studies that have demonstrated the information-structural multifunctionality of both the SIC (Wandruszka 1981(Wandruszka , 1982Bernini 1995;Berretta 1995;Sornicola 1995;Sasse 1995;Belletti 2004;Bonvino 2005;Sasse 2006;Meulleman 2012;Belletti 2018;Cardinaletti 2018) and the PC (Karssenberg et al 2017). It turns out that both constructions can also display radically different information-structural uses other than 'theticity' and 'sentence-focus' , including argument-focus construal on the subject, predicate-focus construal, categorical judgment and overt topic constituent-comment structure.…”

Section: A Remark Regarding Multifunctionalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the Italian linguistic literature it has been often noted that that the SIC is most easily found with unaccusative verbs and some unergative verbs, and that intransitive verbs occur in any case more easily than transitive verbs in the SIC (Benincà 1988;Bernini 1995;Sornicola 1995;Pinto 1997;Venier 2002, Meulleman 2012Bentley 2020). Both unergative and unaccusative verbs have only one argument in their valency pattern, compared to the obligatory two arguments in the valency pattern of transitive verbs.…”

Section: The Alternation Between the Sic And The Pcmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…( 2), are the most predominant in use and the most well-studied, both in the Italian linguistic literature, as well as in studies that have a more general linguistic background. The SIC and the PC can in almost all instances be considered to constitute a pair of alternating constructions which both can be used to express the functional categories of 'theticity' and 'sentence-focus' (Berretta 1995;Bernini 1995;Ward 1999;Venier 2002;Fiorentino 2005;Cruschina 2012;Meulleman 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions

Belligh

Cuypere

Crocco

2022

RRO

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In this article we study the alternation between the two most prominent Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions, viz. the Syntactic Inversion Construction (henceforth: SIC), e.g. Arriva il treno (‘The train is arriving’), and the Presentational Cleft (henceforth: PC), e.g. C’è il treno che arriva (‘The train is arriving’). Based on the existing literature on the two constructions and drawing inspiration from a number of cognitive-functional hypotheses pertaining to constraints on the amount of referentially new constituents that can be conveyed in a single clause, we put forward the hypothesis that Italian language users are more likely to prefer the PC over the SIC if the utterance involves a high number of referentially new constituents. To assess this hypothesis, we constructed a pilot experiment consisting of a 100-split forced choice task that was administered by means of an online questionnaire to 66 native speaker participants. The results of the experiment indicate that the preference for the PC indeed increases if the number of referentially new constituents is higher. This is however not the only factor involved in the alternation and the preference of the language users seems not only to be determined by the number of referentially new constituents, but also by their syntactic status.

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Section: An Overview Of the Constructions Involvedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Syntactic Inversion Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Remark Regarding Multifunctionalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Alternation Between the Sic And The Pcmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions

Belligh

Cuypere

Crocco

2022

RRO

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Theticity and sentence-focus in Italian: grammatically encoded categories or categories of language use?

Belligh

Crocco

2022

Linguistics

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This article aims to examine whether Italian has theticity and sentence-focus among its grammatically encoded categories. After the categories of theticity and sentence-focus are introduced, the concepts of grammatically encoded category and category of language use are operationalized along the lines of Integral Linguistics. For a functional category to qualify as a grammatically encoded category of a language, the language should have at least one construction that structurally encodes the category as its indefeasible semantics. The article provides a qualitative investigation of both corpus-based and constructed examples of the eight Italian sentential structures that have hitherto been recognized in the literature as thetic or sentence-focus constructions. It is shown that each of the constructions has information structural uses that are incompatible with a structurally encoded theticity or sentence-focus semantics, i.e., topic-comment structure and narrow focus construal. It is argued that theticity and sentence-focus are therefore categories of language use rather than grammatically encoded categories of Italian.

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Verb-subject order in Italian: an investigation of short announcements and telecast news

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions

Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions

Theticity and sentence-focus in Italian: grammatically encoded categories or categories of language use?

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