Contrast and intervention at the periphery

•Contrast intervenes in the distribution of clefts inside adverbial clauses.•A contrastive feature plays a role in intervention effects.•Evidence comes from the distribution of other left-peripheral constructions.

The paper investigates the role of contrast in the distribution of some syntactic phenomena and offers an account on the basis of feature intervention. It shows that a large series of distributional facts concerning the distribution of cleft sentences in both English and French and argument preposing in English, as well as the relative position of contrastive topics and foci, are accounted for by adding the feature contrast, ©, to the features Q(uantificational) and δ (d-linking, non-contrastive clitic left-dislocation) which are already used in literature on featural Relativized Minimality. Evidence from scrambling in Dutch and from contrastive focus preposing in Italian shows that the feature © blocks movement of another constituent endowed with the same feature. This feature is also responsible for distributional facts concerning argument preposing in English. In particular, it accounts for the impossibility of a non-contrastive argument to get preposed in a non-assertive clause. Similarly, the feature © is shown to have a blocking effect for an element bearing the feature Q.