L’uso della punteggiatura nelle strutture marcate a sinistraUno studio corpus-based dell’italiano giornalistico online

Italian left marked structures are generally represented in the literature with a comma separating left marked constituent from the rest of the clause. Commas are maintained to signal the prosodic, syntactic and information characteristics of the left marked constituent. Precisely, commas are claimed to signal a pause occurring after left marked constituents, which mirrors their syntactic and information extraposition. Based on 148 left marked structures extracted from a corpus of Italian online newspapers, this work provides evidence that punctuation in real texts do not systematically correlate with left marked structures’ syntactic features nor does it mimic their information structure. The analysis shows that, in Italian, punctuation in left marked structures is used to disambiguate their communicative function in texts. The work contributes to the understanding of the relation between syntax, information structure and punctuation.