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The volume presents recent results in the field of Information Structure based on research on Italian and Italian dialects, and on further studies on several typologically different languages. The central idea is that Information Structure is not an exclusive matter of syntax but an interface issue which involves the interplay of at least the phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic levels of analysis. In addition, the volume is based on the study of actual language use and it adopts a cross-linguistic point of view.

Background People from ethnically diverse backgrounds are underrepresented in clinical trials, reinforcing healthcare inequity. Co-production involves users of research (knowledge users) as partners in the research process. A premise of co-production is that it enhances ethicality of research by responding to the needs and preferences of those it is designed for while facilitating adoption and impact. Research reporting co-production in ethnically diverse communities is emerging; however, reporting of specific strategies to support effective co-production remains sparse, particularly when designing interventions for clinical trials. We draw on our experience of co-production with ethnically diverse communities to address this gap in the research literature using the exemplar, MOVE Together: Reduce falls , a co-produced intervention to support people aged over 65 years from ethnically diverse communities to develop exercise habits and reduce their risk of falls. Methods Utilizing an integrated knowledge translation (IKT) approach to co-production, our team of 24 partners, including people aged over 65 years from ethnically diverse communities, representatives from ethnically diverse community groups and service providers developed our intervention over five stages. Two stages engaged 75 participants including 63 (84%) people aged over 65 years from three ethnically diverse communities (Chinese, Italian and Arabic-speaking) and 12 service providers. The remaining three stages involved the co-production research team. Results Strong participant satisfaction (96%) and co-production team consensus regarding the readiness of our intervention for progression to clinical trial (100%) support the success of our approach. Strategies to optimize communication and uphold the principles of co-production were identified by our team as important to the process. Drawing on research evidence and our experience we highlight potential strategies to support alignment with the principles of co-production when co-producing with people from ethnically diverse communities. These include additional time and financial resources, tailored approaches to information provision and a culturally responsive approach. Conclusions When co-producing interventions for clinical trials with ethnically diverse communities, co-production teams must be prepared for the additional resources necessary to ensure genuine partnership. In this exemplar, we describe an iterative approach to health research co-production that may inform future health research involving under-served populations.

STYLISTIC FRONTING (SF) is an optional syntactic phenomenon whereby a lexical item that may belong to various syntactic categories fronts to a pre-finite-V position, if no subject is merged in SPECIP. The literature reports that SF is productive in Icelandic and Old Scandinavian, and it is also attested in some Old Romance languages (Old Catalan, Old French). This article presents a phase-based analysis of SF in Old Italian. In this language, SF has some previously undiscussed characteristics. A corpus study shows that Old Italian displays a root/nonroot asymmetry in the typology of fronting items. In root clauses, nominal elements, such as nominal predicates with a special semantics, front more frequently than verbal elements (infinitives, past participles), which most frequently front in nonroot clauses. Since fronting in root clauses is intrinsically ambiguous with topicalization and focalization, it is not considered SF and is not extensively discussed in this article. By contrast, I analyze as proper SF the fronting operation that occurs in nonroot clauses, and I argue that this is a movement anchoring the event-structure (VP) semantic content to the context (FINP). This type of movement is possible only if vP is not a phase and no intervening agentive external argument is merged in SPECVP. The fronted material is pragmatically presupposed and interpreted as the SUBJECT OF PREDICATION. Pragmatics tests corroborate the argument.

This paper argues that the Polish noun-pronoun asymmetry in which the intensifier ‘self’ precedes nouns and follows pronominals is not a simple case of configuration in the DP, whereby pronouns, unlike nominals, target D for referential reasons (cf. , ). Such viewpoints, in the case of Polish, are unfortunate because they appear to underlyingly work on and draw from the syntax of nominal projections characteristic of English or Italian i.e., languages with articles. We show that the asymmetry pertains to various semantic interpretations of , the different semantic specification of nominals and pronominals, and the flexible word order property. What we need, therefore, is a broader clausal perspective coupled with necessary remarks on the abovementioned issues. Thus, rather than employing the DP-hypothesis, we assume two cornerstone phenomena i.e. flexible word order and rich agreement to be crucial here as they facilitate syntactic options like focalisation or topicalisation which manifest discourse information and in which functions as a focus or topic particle (cf. ). These contexts are held typical of the asymmetry, thereby making it an interplay between semantic properties of nominal/pronominal expressions and organisation of discourse information that syntax makes available.

In the literature on Romance and Germanic V2, the fronted XP in the preverbal field is generally described as pragmatically salient, tacitly implying a crucial relationship between the V2 phenomenon and information structure. The degree to which discourse-pragmatics is pervasive in the V2 syntax is subject to cross-linguistic variation; nevertheless, the discussion of the phenomenon is often marginal in the literature. This paper sheds more light on the interaction between the V2 constraint and information structure by investigating two North-Eastern Italian dialects, Lamonat and Sovramontino, whose V2 constraint is solely linked to the unpackaging of discourse-pragmatic information. V2motivated T-to-C movement ensures: (i) adjacency of the verb to the pragmatically salient element that, hence, receives discourse prominence; and (ii) the correct interpretation of contrastive elements, which are structurally realised in the preverbal field. The investigation of contrastive XPs suggests that contrastiveness should be regarded as an independent discourse-pragmatic status that supersedes topic and focus. In this respect, contrastiveness should not be considered a categorical notion, but a continuum in which the degree of contrastiveness is determined by the properties of the set containing the contrastive element.

In this dissertation, I investigate the sensitivity of ϕ-agreement to features typically associated with Ā-extraction, including those related to wh-questioning, relativization, focus and topicalization. This phenomenon has been referred to as anti-agreement (Ouhalla 1993) or wh-agreement (Chung and Georgopoulos 1988; Georgopoulos 1991; Chung 1994) in the literature. While anti-agreement is commonly held to result from constraints on the Ā-movement of agreeing DPs, I argue that it reduces to an instance of wh-agreement, or the appearance of particular morphological forms in the presence of Ā-features. I develop a unified account of these Ā-sensitive ϕ-agreement effects in which they arise from the ability of ϕ- probes to copy both ϕ-features and Ā-features in the syntax, coupled with postsyntactic morphological operations that manipulate feature bundles containing both [ϕ] and [Ā]. The empirical foundation of the work is a typological survey of Ā-sensitive ϕ-agreement effects in 63 genetically and geographically diverse languages. This study is the largest of its kind to examine these effects, and brings to light new generalizations both about the syntax of Ā-sensitive ϕ-agreement effects and the behavior of ϕ-features in the presence of Ā-features. I first investigate in detail the effect of Ā-features on ϕ-agreement in three languages: the West Caucasian language Abaza (O’Herin 2002); the Berber language Tarifit (Ouhalla 1993; El Hankari 2010); and the Northern Italian dialect Fiorentino (Brandi and Cordin 1989; Suñer 1992). I show that in all three languages, the agreement exponents that appear in the context of Ā-features are systematically underspecified. I argue that this underspecification results from the morphological operation impoverishment, a widely assumed morphological operation in Distributed Morphology (DM; Halle 1990, Halle and Marantz 1993) which deletes features from terminals postsyntactically prior to Vocabulary Insertion (Bonet 1991; Noyer 1992). I argue that ϕ-probes are able to copy both ϕ-features and Ā-features from their goals. In the morphological component, partial or total impoverishment may apply to the head containing both ϕ- and Ā-features, deleting some or all of the ϕ-features. Impoverishment blocks insertion of an otherwise appropriate, more highly specified agreement exponent. I then examine the patterns of ϕ-exponence that emerge in the context of Ā-features. I show that leveling of ϕ-features in the presence of Ā-features can be total or partial and that the patterns of partial leveling are limited. Specifically, there is an implicational hierarchy that governs which contrasts can be leveled. Building on much existing work on the structure of ϕ-features, I adopt a version of Campbell’s (2012) two dimensional ϕ-geometries. These rich feature sets capture both dominance relations among ϕ-feature categories (person, gender and number) and entailment relations between subfeatures within those categories (such as ±participant and ±author). I argue that impoverishment operates over these rich ϕ-sets. Coupled with a constraint that restricts deletion to ϕ-categories, this theory of impoverishment derives all and only the attested patterns of ϕ-leveling in the context of anti-agreement. I further show that ϕ-feature impoverishment and the exponence of the Ā-feature that triggers impoverishment are formally independent. That is, a language may have a reduced number of ϕ-feature contrasts in the context of an Ā-feature without ever morphologically realizing the Ā-feature (as is the case in Fiorentino), or the Ā-feature may be realized without any ϕ-impoverishment taking place (as is the case in the Atlantic language Kobiana). I explore the distribution of Ā-sensitive ϕ-agreement effects. First, I present data from Tundra Nenets (Uralic, Nikolaeva 2014) and Abaza that Ā-movement is not required to trigger such effects. Tundra Nenets exhibits anti-agreement with true wh-in-situ, and Abaza exhibits anti-agreement triggered by pronouns bound by Ā-operators. Furthermore, I show that in the languages Dinka (Nilotic, van Urk 2015) and Selayarese (Austronesian, Finer 1997), although anti-agreement is linked to Ā-movement, the variation in which arguments and which Ā-dependencies trigger these effects cannot be explained structurally. In Dinka, syntactically identical Ā-dependencies differ as to whether they have a morphological effect on agreement. In Selayarese, there is no unique structural configuration that leads to anti-agreement. I show that the distribution of anti-agreement in Dinka and Selayarese can be derived through reference to the Ā-features that trigger anti-agreement (feature-based variation) and which heads are targeted for Ā-feature impoverishment in the presence of an ϕ-feature (probe-based variation). (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)

The 100th anniversary of Verdi's death, observed in 2001, inspired nearly a dozen academic conferences. At the dawn of his 2013 bicentennial, a celebratory year shared with Richard Wagner, hundreds of recent studies assess Verdi's life, his works, and his impact. The present article surveys a selection of books and articles published between these two commemorations. A popular topic is Verdi's role as a national icon, the calculated product of Italy's search for a postunification identity. His engagement with foreign cultures has also received attention, for his German literary sources, his forays into French grand opera, and his use of exotic settings. Recent studies of Verdi's operas often focus on the testing of boundaries, whether between genres, genders, or psychological states. While musical analyses still engage with operatic convention, they also examine other features, such as melody, meter, and tempo. Visual aspects of performance (set design, lighting, staging), considered separately in some studies and as a unified concept in others, constitute a newer area of scholarly interest.

In this article, the author focus on the influence of Luigi Pirandello on Miguel de Unamuno. The first similarities between these two writers appear on a Pirandellian short story titled A character's tragedy and Unamuno's novel, Niebla. Furthermore, he analyze two dramas of the Spanish author, El hermano Juan and El otro and I remark on its commonalities with the philosophy of Luigi Pirandello. Finally, I realize that the Pirandello's topics such as madness versus sanity, to be versus to seem, the coexistence of reality and fiction and the art of play within a play appear in both texts of the Spanish author unanimously and consistently.

This dissertation examines the role of the addressee in syntax, focusing on nominals that refer to addressees: vocatives (calls and addresses) and imperative subjects. Beginning with Moro (2003), generative analyses of vocatives have proposed that they are associated with functional projections at the left edge of or above CP. Such analyses are unable to account for the existence of mid­sentential addresses. I propose that vocatives (specifically addresses) are merged into the specifier of a functional projection, AddrP, which is located in the topic field of the CP domain (specifically between the highest TopP and FocP). This position correctly reflects that mid-sentential vocatives delineate an information structure boundary between old information (topics) and new information (focus). I show that the derivation of mid-sentential vocatives is sensitive to syntactic islands, supporting their treatment in the narrow syntax. I also propose that AddrP bears an allocutive feature, which in some languages is realized as non­argument addressee agreement in the inflectional domain. I next turn to the internal structure of vocatives, starting by rebuking the claim that vocative case is a variant of nominative. I propose that vocative is an inherent case associated with an additional layer of functional structure. This layer surfaces in adjective­initial vocatives in Italian, Romanian and Slavic, which I argue are the result of N-to­D movement of the nominalized adjective. I also propose a new condition for predicting the distribution of overt imperative subjects in English, based on the observation that they require the presence of a non-null set of contextually defined alternatives. Finally, I examine the claim that vocatives are parenthetical, and consider the consequences of such a statement. I find that a subset of other elements which are described as parenthetical also mark information structure boundaries, and may also be associated with a functional projection in the topic domain of CP.