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.

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.