On links and tails in Italian

Adopting Vallduví’s partition of the background into link and tail, I provide an account for Italian data. Being links pre-focal expressions, and tails post-focal, right dislocated expressions, I claim that links are shifting topics, while tails are discourse-given material. I show that a link is not iterated in discourse as long as the topic does not shift. If a link appears to refer to the current topic, topic shift is still visible in the interpretive effects that arise. In particular, topic shift explains why a link is sometimes contrastive. A link implies an alternative set, because a shifting topic is always sorted among alternatives. Contrast derives from the possibility to evoke alternatives and from the contextual conditions that make alternatives relevant. Since a tail never evokes alternatives, trivially there is no context where it can be contrastive. I compare Italian and other languages and observe the reduced role of intonation in the linguistic marking of Italian links. I further show that the properties of tails are shared by all post-focal material, also material not commonly analyzed as right dislocated. Independent support is given by recent syntactic accounts of post-focal background, which treat it precisely as right dislocated material.