Left Periphery of the Clause: Primarily Illustrated for Italian

Abstract

Abstract The analysis of the left periphery was one of the first topics of the research program referred to as “the cartography of syntactic structures.” This program is based on the observation that syntactic representations are complex structures consisting of sequences of hierarchically organized functional elements. Drawing detailed maps of such structures has been shown to have valuable heuristic power in the investigation of how syntactic structures interact with principles constraining syntactic computations and the interfaces with sound and meaning. The study of the left periphery has been extensively pursued in the last years. The strategy initially adopted, in the mid 1990s, has been to analyze in great detail the left periphery in a language, Italian; then, the initial map based on Italian was used as a benchmark for comparative analyses, starting the comparison with closely related languages, and progressively extending it to typologically and historically distant languages. In this case study we retrace this development, starting from the initial map based on Italian, in the context of the early cartographic studies. We then move to extensions and modifications, addressing specific points in which the cross‐linguistic evidence has played a key role. We dwell on the criterial approach, according to which the left periphery of the clause is populated by a sequence of functional heads (Top, Foc, Q, etc.) attracting phrases with matching features, and guiding the interpretation of such configurations at the interfaces with sound and meaning. We subsequently address some interpretive properties of topic and focus structures at the interfaces in connection with the assignment of the prosodic properties and the proper use in discourse. The case study concludes with a discussion of the parametrizations which must be assumed and of the prospects of tracing back the observed properties to deeper explanatory principles of syntactic computation.