Abstract
Concerning the phenomena commonly attributed to the left periphery, Sardinian does not differ from Romance languages with respect to clitic left dislocated topics, right dislocation, contrastive focus and wh-interrogatives. However, in Sardinian, there are some crucial differences in the organisation of the left periphery, compared to Italian or Spanish: First, whereas contrastive focus constructions in these languages show non-predicative, i.e. referential fronted constituents, Sardinian also allows fronted predicative elements. Second, a fronted element in Sardinian must not necessarily have contrastive focus, but is, most of the time, interpreted as having information focus. Furthermore, fronting of predicative and non-predicative elements is particularly common in yes/no questions. Fourth, Sardinian disposes of an alternative strategy to mark these polar questions via the question particle a. Finally, neither focus fronting nor question-marking through the question particle are allowed in wh- and in negated interrogative contexts. The main issue to be addressed in this paper is how the interaction between focus fronting, question-marking, negation and also topicalisation can be formalised and explained in the cartographic framework of Rizzi (1997) and, as an alternative, in a dynamic model of the feature-driven minimalist approach of Chomsky (1995ff.).
Published Version
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