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This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The relevance of ‘unexpected'data taken into account in the last decades, such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance, has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning, discourse organization and speakers'rhetorical strategies, thus moving away from ‘sentence-based'perspectives. At the same time, this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories, such as Focus and Topic, to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences, all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.

Questo volume persegue un triplice obiettivo. In primo luogo, si descrivono le proprietà distribuzionali, formali e funzionali dei costrutti di sintassi marcata dell'italiano dell'uso medio alla luce del loro impiego nella scrittura dei quotidiani online, un tipo di testo ancora poco noto. In secondo luogo, si identificano le proprietà che caratterizzano tali costrutti in un contesto europeo, vale a dire rispetto alle proprietà delle stesse (o analoghe) strutture in francese, spagnolo, tedesco e inglese. Questa scelta si giustifica con il fatto che il confronto interlinguistico permette di raggiungere il terzo obiettivo della presente ricerca: collocare l'italiano in un quadro tipologico romanzo e, più generalmente, europeo.