Left peripheral interactions in Sardinian

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, 1998] , [Chomsky, 2000] , [Chomsky, 2004] and [Chomsky, 2005].