Abstract :
Romance languages make use of topicalisation as a grammatical strategy to mark [−focus] constituents, typically under Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) and Clitic Right Dislocation (CLRD). As a distinctive property, topicalisation involves clitic resumption (CR) of the dislocated constituent in Italian, as well as in other Romance languages (French, Spanish, Catalan). However, a great deal of variation is found in regard to the actual realisation of the resumptive clitic, which is traditionally explained by assuming that CR is optional. In Italian, CR of topic constituents proves to be optional with all phrases, except with direct objects and partitive complements. By contrast, the presence of a resumptive clitic is strictly required in all dislocation structures involving verbal arguments in other Romance varieties, such as Catalan and Sicilian. The aim of this paper is to identify the syntactic properties and the pragmatics characterisation of dislocation constructions lacking CR, and to account for the apparent optionality and the variation found across Romance. We claim that there are no optional nor null clitics, and that non-resumed dislocation actually corresponds to structures other than CLLD/CLRD, as suggested by the fact that the constructions lacking CR exhibit a wide range of syntactic differences with respect to the clitic-resumed counterparts.
