The distribution of focus and the mapping between syntax and information structure

Abstract The availability of preverbal focus in Romance is still the subject of controversy in the relevant literature. In this paper, we investigate the distribution of information focus in three Romance languages: Catalan, Spanish and Italian. The main goal is to understand if and to what extent information focus can occur preverbally in these three languages. To this end, we applied a new technique (Q uestions with a D elayed A nswer ) to elicit both production data and acceptability judgements. Our results show that preverbal foci are almost never produced in free speech under elicitation but are judged as acceptable by native speakers in rating tasks. The acceptability of preverbal foci, however, is subject to variation: they are more acceptable in Spanish but less so in Catalan and Italian. We interpret this difference across the three Romance languages in the light of the hypothesis formulated in Leonetti (2017), according to which Catalan and especially Italian are more restrictive than Spanish with respect to the mapping between syntax and information structure. While all languages resort to the dedicated word order with a more transparent information-structure partition for a focal subject (i.e. VS), Spanish is more permissive in also allowing a narrow focus interpretation of the subject in an SV order.