Quantifier preposing in French and Italian as a root phenomenon: A syntactic or a pragmatic approach?
Quantifier preposing in French and Italian as a root phenomenon: A syntactic or a pragmatic approach?

Summary/Abstract: On the basis of a corpus research it is shown that quantifier preposing in French and Italian, arguably a focalization mechanism, is a root phenomenon, occurring only in root-clauses and in root-like clauses. It is furthermore shown that other types of focalization in the left periphery in French and Italian are not root phenomena, in accordance with Emonds’ claim for English clefting. The question is why there should be such a difference. Three recent approaches to root phenomena are discussed, a syntactic one, a pragmatic-semantic one, and a mixed one. A mixed analysis of the focalization data is proposed.

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