Mica preposing as focus fronting

Abstract

This paper deals with the Italian presuppositional negation marker mica. This particle can surface differently in the negative circuit, e.g. either in a clause-initial or a clause-internal position. However, depending on its position, different types of focus and pragmatic requirements are found. We consider the initial mica as an instance of corrective focus and the clause-internal one as encoding a more generic contrastive focus. We show that this is in line with the recent findings on focus typology of Italian.

Keywords

• presuppositional negation
• focus fronting
• negation in Italian