Confronting Focus Strategies in Finnish and in Italian: An Experimental Study on Object Focusing

Focus is cross-linguistically associated with a number of different strategies, such as fronting, clefting, markers, and prosody. In some cases, the choice between one strategy or another determined by language-specific rules, while in others, two more strategies seem to be optional, thus, somehow “unpredictable”. this experimental study, we investigate syntactic employed object focusing Finnish Italian examining syntactic, semantic, pragmatic features underlying specific strategy. particular, present experiment aimed both languages for realization, namely, situ order verify whether them influenced type feature, combination Focus-related features, verb category involved, interplay these three factors. The incidence alternative constructions, particular clefting -hAn discourse marker Finnish, also taken into consideration, relevant asymmetries are analyzed comprehensive, comparative account.