Final and non-final focus in Italian DPs

This paper examines the distribution of focus in Italian DPs, revealing its strict parallelism with the distribution of focus in Italian clauses. As in clauses, focus occurs rightmost in DPs, as claimed by Bernstein and as predicted by Zubizarreta's prosody-driven analysis of rightmost focus at clause level. Furthermore, instances of non-final focus in the DP are shown to involve DP-final focus followed by the dislocation of post-focus constituents in DP-external position, closely paralleling analyses of non-final focus suggested by Vallduví, Cardinaletti, and Brunetti and further developed by Samek-Lodovici. The paper also uncovers an interesting asymmetry concerning the availability of non-final focus within DPs involving multiple adjectives. Non-final focus appears restricted to the higher adjective alone due to constraints on the right-dislocation of adjectival phrases. A similar asymmetry is shown to affect focused adverbs in clauses.