This volume includes contributions offering up-to-date analyses of non-canonical word orders (fronting, inversion, dislocations, and cleft constructions) in Italian and in Italian in a contrastive perspective with other Romance and/or Germanic languages. All studies rely on a strong empirical basis.

Anna-Maria De Cesare is currently Assistant Professor and Professor of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Basel (Section of Italian Linguistics). Davide Garassino is currently Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich (Institute of Romance Studies).

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 – 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.