<b>The syntax-phonology interface in focus and topic constructions in Italian.</b> By Mara Frascarelli. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000. Pp. ix, 224. Cloth, $96.00.

Reviewed by: The syntax-phonology interface in focus and topic constructions in Italian by Mara Frascarelli Asya Pereltsvaig The syntax-phonology interface in focus and topic constructions in Italian. By Mara Frascarelli. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000. Pp. ix, 224. Cloth, $96.00. This book makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate on the structure of topic and (narrow) focus constructions. The originality of this work is in its syntax-phonology interface perspective. The discussion is driven by the minimalist assumption that syntax is defined by ‘bare output conditions’; the goal of this book is to determine the nature of PF output conditions that affect topic and focus constructions and to show what syntactic information is visible at PF. The analysis proposed in this book is based on an extensive empirical study of topic and focus constructions in Italian. The three kinds of data are grammaticality judgments, original tape recorded sentences, and data from De Mauro’s (1993) corpus of recorded conversations. This multisourced database allows the author to avoid any theory-centered directionality in the analysis. Even though the research in this book is centered on Italian, data from other languages—including English, Hungarian, Modern Greek, Hausa, Chichewa, Serbo-Croatian, and Somali—are discussed as well. The book opens with a useful introduction to the issues discussed in later chapters. Ch. 1 starts out with a brief discussion of topic and focus constructions in Italian. An overview of the minimalist assumptions underlying the discussion in this book is given as well. The rest of the book is organized as follows: Ch. 2 presents a prosodic analysis of topic and focus constructions, and Ch. 3 presents a syntactic analysis of the same constructions. Ch. 4 is dedicated to the issues of the syntax-phonology interface. Ch. 2 investigates the differences that occur in prosodic organization of Italian sentences in the presence of marked topic and focus elements. Frascarelli examines the tape-recorded data that provide evidence for the influence of focus and topic constructions on the application of phonological rules. She argues that topic and focus in Italian are prosodically grammaticalized. More specifically, she proposes that the interaction of syntactic constituents of topic and focus with prosodic phonology is located at the phonological phrase and the intonational phrase. F argues for a number of restructuring operations of these prosodic categories triggered by either focus of topic constituents. Ch. 3 provides a syntactic analysis of focus and topic constructions. F proposes that focus information is contained in a strong feature, checked in overt syntax by the verbal head, and thus visible at interfaces. The topic construction, on the other hand, is analyzed as generated extrasententially: No feature-checking process is associated with it, and no movement is necessary for its interpretation. Finally, Ch. 4 provides some conclusions about the syntax-phonology interface interpretation of focus and topic. On the basis of the analysis developed in the book, F shows that some syntactic information is made accessible to PF, thus allowing a correct interpretation of these marked constituents. On the whole, this work is a positive contribution to the research on how discourse-related information is expressed in natural language, and it will serve as a useful starting point for further discussion. Asya Pereltsvaig McGill University Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.