The empirical work on sentence structure over the last several years has been advanced by the so-called cartographic program, which aims to provide a map of the functional projections in clausal architecture; in the framework of this project, a highly articulated functional structure has been developed, where specialised positions appear to have the same respective order across languages. This volume is the fifth in the cartographic series. For the first time, a whole volume is devoted to the functional articulation of a single structural layer, the so called complementizer system, the highest ... More

The empirical work on sentence structure over the last several years has been advanced by the so-called cartographic program, which aims to provide a map of the functional projections in clausal architecture; in the framework of this project, a highly articulated functional structure has been developed, where specialised positions appear to have the same respective order across languages. This volume is the fifth in the cartographic series. For the first time, a whole volume is devoted to the functional articulation of a single structural layer, the so called complementizer system, the highest part of sentence structure: its left edge ‘looks outside’ the sentence, constituting the interface with the linguistic or situational context; its right edge ‘looks inside’, and connects the CP layer with positions located in the lower IP layer. The papers collected here identify — on the basis of substantial empirical evidence — new atoms of functional structure, which encode specific features out of the range of interpretive aspects that are prototypically expressed in the left-periphery; at the same time, the by now richly articulated CP structure is submitted to further crosslinguistic checking, finding encouraging consistencies and confirmation. The research work witnessed by this volume has led to the identification of new, important restrictions in the relative sequence of elements appearing in the left periphery (like complementizers and clause typing morphemes, wh-items/phrases, focalized constituents, topics); on the other hand, it sheds new light on the ‘pragmatic side’ of the left periphery, that is, those aspects of the utterance that are tied to the speaker’s point of view and to his individual perception of the event with respect to contextual factors.