Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale
Journal issue | 51 | 2017
Research Article | Scrambling as verum focus
Scrambling as verum focus
German ‘Scrambling’ meets Romance ‘Anaphoric Anteposition’
Abstract
In this paper I demonstrate that in Mòcheno, a German dialect spoken in Northern Italy, scrambling, i.e. the movement of any constituent above sentential adverbs and below the finite verb, is permitted like in Continental Germanic languages. Unlike in these languages, however, leftward movement is not triggered by specificity or scope-fixing (A-scrambling) or by the need to check any topic or contrastive/new-information focus discourse-features (A’-scrambling). By relying on information structure, the syntax of modal particles and the distribution of scrambling in sentences with fronted operators, I provide evidence that scrambling in Mòcheno triggers a verum focus reading on the truth value of the sentence and involves a type of focus movement to a FocusP in CP. That scrambling can be associated with verum focus is a unicum among Continental Germanic languages, which I show follows from a reanalyis of the properties of Germanic focus scrambling under the influence of Romance anaphoric anteposition.
Submitted: April 12, 2016 | Accepted: July 11, 2016 | Published Sept. 28, 2017 | Language: en
Keywords Modal particles • Information structure • Emphatic focus • Verb Second
Copyright © 2017 Federica Cognola. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2499-1562/AnnOc-51-17-12
