Is it prosody that settles the syntactic issue?

An analysis of italian cleft sentences

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the prosodic realization of Italian cleft sentences, in order to provide some new cues for their still debated syntactic interpretation. A monoclausal approach to the analysis of cleft sentences (a.o. Meinunger, 1998) parallels them to left focalization constructions, while a biclausal approach (a.o. Belletti, 2008) considers them composed of a main copular clause and an embedded pseudo-relative clause. A systematic comparison between cleft sentences and left focalizations – carried out through an experimental study and an analysis of pitch accent distribution, scaling, and prosodic phrasing – leads to conclude that their prosodic realization is very similar, thus suggesting that a monoclausal analysis for cleft sentences is supported by prosodic data.