This volume aims at offering an up-to-date survey on non-canonical word orders and their interplay with information structure and discourse organization. The contributions analyze different non-canonical syntactic structures (fronting, inversion, dislocations, and cleft constructions), focusing on Italian alone or on Italian in a contrastive perspective with one or more Romance (French, Romanian, Portuguese, Spanish) and/or Germanic (English and German) languages. The authors tackle the main issue of the volume from a variety of perspectives and by relying on different theoretical frameworks. At the same time, they all offer a fine-grained description of the structures analyzed on the basis of a solid empirical foundation.

Contents: Manuel Leonetti: On Non-Focal Fronting in Italian and Spanish - Lunella Mereu: Obliques and the initial syntactic position - Dieter Vermandere/Karen Lahousse: Verb-subject inversion in Romance; the other way round - Valeria Buttini: I am (not) scared of left dislocations. The rendering of the structure in the French and English translations of Niccolo Ammaniti's novel I am not scared - Fabio Rossi: La dislocazione a destra nell'italiano scritto: rilievi statistici, pragmatici e sintattici - Barbara Wehr: Some remarks on different classifications of cleft constructions and their areal distribution - Davide Garassino: Using cleft sentences in Italian and English. A multifactorial analysis - Ada Valentini: Signor Presidente, sono due anni che aspettiamo: la scissa durativa italiana in un confronto interlinguistico sul corpus multilingue EUROPARL - Alessandro Panunzi: Pseudocleft Sentences in Spoken Italian. Syntax, Semantics, Information Structure, and a Comparison with Spanish.