Mapping the Left Periphery

The research work carried out on the CP-structure within the cartographic framework has led to the identification of restrictions in the relative sequence of elements appearing in the left periphery, which on the one hand qualify the clause type or mark the kind of subordination, and on the other attract operators and elements carrying information tied to the speaker's point of view and his individual evaluation of the event. The contributors were asked to identify the precise positions of functional heads already postulated in the literature, or identify new functional projections; the authors were also encouraged to discuss – on the basis of substantial empirical evidence – general or specific parts of the theoretical framework, or to submit the richly articulated CP structure to further typological checking. The universal restrictions on ordering have been discovered in an inductive way; the papers in this volume, even those that appear to be predominantly descriptive, have the empirical value of reinforcing the general hypothesis; new generalizations take form that raise new questions, in general about the relation between form and function, between visible elements (particles, derivational and inflectional morphology) and syntactic phenomena. Although the main aim of the present volume is to promote further research on the rich functional articulation of the highest structural layer of sentence structure, the so-called complementizer system, the papers can be subdivided into two main groups. Some of the papers present evidence in favor of ordering restrictions among projections located within the CP layer proper and analyze their semantic content and syntactic properties (Aboh & Pfau, Badan & Del Gobbo, Hernanz, Lipták, Munaro). Others discuss phenomena that illustrate the evident solidarity among points of the structure that are not adjacent and do not belong to the same 'field' (Damonte, Haegeman, Ledgeway, Poletto & Zanuttini); this is an area that deserves further investigation, and perhaps also new creative hypotheses, concerning the design of the structure as a physical object, in some sense.