Abstract

The chapter presents a general overview of several phenomena related to information structure in the Romance languages and varieties spoken in Europe and takes into account the left and the right side of the clause as the locus where information structure is encoded. The first part presents an overview of the syntactic and phonological properties of constructions like Hanging Topics, Left Dislocation, and fronted foci and of their pragmatic import as well as of the properties of constructions which occur on the right side of the clause. In the second part a general overview of syntactic and prosodic accounts proposed in the literature is provided with special attention to the problems each type of account raises with respect to the empirical domain considered.