Theticity and sentence-focus in Italian: grammatically encoded categories or categories of language use?

• Published in: Linguistics Vol. 60; no. 4; pp. 1241 - 1293
• Main Authors: Belligh, Thomas, Crocco, Claudia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin De Gruyter 26.07.2022; Walter de Gruyter GmbH
• Subjects: construction grammar; Corpus analysis; grammatically encoded category; integral linguistics; Italian; Italian language; Language; Semantic categories; Semantic processing; Semantics; Sentence structure; sentence-focus; Syntactic structures; theticity; Topic and comment
• ISSN: 0024-3949; 1613-396X
• DOI: 10.1515/ling-2020-0141

This article aims to examine whether Italian has theticity and sentence-focus among its grammatically encoded categories. After the categories of theticity and sentence-focus are introduced, the concepts of grammatically encoded category and category of language use are operationalized along the lines of Integral Linguistics. For a functional category to qualify as a grammatically encoded category of a language, the language should have at least one construction that structurally encodes the category as its indefeasible semantics. The article provides a qualitative investigation of both corpus-based and constructed examples of the eight Italian sentential structures that have hitherto been recognized in the literature as thetic or sentence-focus constructions. It is shown that each of the constructions has information structural uses that are incompatible with a structurally encoded theticity or sentence-focus semantics, i.e., topic-comment structure and narrow focus construal. It is argued that theticity and sentence-focus are therefore categories of language use rather than grammatically encoded categories of Italian.