Ma non era rosso? (But wasn’t it red?): On counter-expectational questions in Italian

In this article I investigate the properties of counter-expectational surprise yes-no questions in Italian, introduced by the adversative particle ma. These structures minimally contrast with surprise exclamations. I provide an analysis of the left periphery able to explain the observations concerning the distribution of ma, for instance that it must precede all other items in the clause and cannot be embedded. I propose that ma is a discourse head, projecting a syntactic structure analogous to that of normal syntactic heads. Discourse heads, however, connect separate sentences, which can also be uttered by different speakers, provided that they belong to the same context. I also add some brief remarks on the so-called expletive negation appearing in these cases.