Focus structure

Abstract This chapter presents an analysis of the focus structure of four types of Italo-Romance there sentence: existentials, inverse locatives, deictic locatives, and presentationals. In contrast with traditional approaches which have focused on the pragmatic and discourse status of the existential pivot, the chapter takes an approach that considers both the construction as a whole and its individual components, thus shedding light on a number of subtle differences between the four types of there sentence, which would otherwise have gone unnoticed. At the same time, it is suggested that the shared morphosyntactic properties of there sentences are motivated by their not being predicate focus structures. In particular, it is claimed that existential sentences typically occur in sentence focus, while inverse and deictic locatives are most typically associated with argument focus. Lastly, presentational there sentences share the sentence focus character of existentials, but have distinct semantic and syntactic properties, and occur in different discourse contexts.