Suvremena lingvistika, Vol. 35 No. 68, 2009.
Izvorni znanstveni članak
Contrastive focalisation in Italian: case study
Sandra Augendre
; Universite Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux 3; Universita degli studi di Caligari
Sažetak
The article aims at working on the relevant strategies in Italian to pass on a contrastive type
information. More precisely, the scope is to study the structures that permit in this language to
mark an element as being the contrastive focus of a statement, which is a type of informative
contribution implying a paradigmatic opposition (X and not Y).
The point of departure is the presentation and the comment of three structures described by
the grammars and the various pragmatic studies as being adapted to the expression of the contrast
in Italian. The first one, considered as specific to introduce a contrastive focus in italian, is
called “contrastive topicalisation”: the contrastive focus is placed in first position and is strongly
stressed. The second one is the “cleft–sentence”: the focus is isolated between the auxiliary and
the relative pronoun in the main clause. The third one is the “focus postposition”: the focus occupies
the ultimate position of the sentence and receives the main stress.
The objective is then to confront these theoretical data to the native speakers and to work on
their intuitions about statements presenting the previous “strategies”. Indeed, the article presents
the results of a research made on twenty persons on the basis of three pairs of statements. For
every pair, it was asked the speakers to analyze the syntactic structure of the sentences, to tell if
they saw a semantic/comunicative difference between both and if they preferred the one or the
other one, and finally to propose linguistic or situational contexts in which they would use each of
them.
The point of view of the speaker will be useful to confirm or to qualify some of the comments
emitted by the grammars to describe the language as regards the realization of a contrastive focus
in Italian. In particular, we will see that, while the grammars present the so–called “contrastive
topicalisation” as totally adapted to the expression of contrastive information in Italian, the speakers
have difficulties to interpret and find contexts for the statements presenting this structure.
The results will led us to develop the idea that the only relevant caracteristic of a contrastive
focus in Italian is prosodic and not syntactic: it needs to be stressed but there is no restriction on
its position in the sentence.
Ključne riječi
informational structure; contrastive focus; Italian; pragmatics; syntax
Hrčak ID:
47106
URI
Datum izdavanja:
16.12.2009.
Posjeta: 1.595 *