Topicalization and Headlines on the Italian Front Pages

The aim of this research is to describe the syntactic properties and information structure of topicalized headlines on the front page of Italian newspapers. Though similar to Hanging Topic constructions, topicalized headlines differ in a number of ways. They prepose a constituent that encodes the Topic, though the determiner is not involved in the left periphery of the clause and there is no resumption of the preposed complement; the bare topic is grammatical and kind-denoting. Unlike Hanging Topic constructions, the Topic in headlines has no preceding explicit context to serve as an antecedent. The Topic is entirely presupposed and resides in longterm Memory.