Sul ruolo delle frasi specificative all’interno del testo

This paper addresses specificational clauses, observed from a syntactic, semantic, lexical and textual point of view. Unlike many works on syntax and semantics, the study does not draw on exempla ficta but on passages from real texts, drawn particularly from academic prose. From the syntactic point of view, it is argued that the preverbal noun is a predicate and not a subject. From the lexical point of view, it is observed that in academic texts the preverbal noun often encodes information related to the logical-argumentative level and cognitive and metatextual aspects; in other cases it also refers to elements of the propositional content. As far as textual features are concerned, it is noted that due to preverbal nouns the conceptual category to which the subject belongs is presented as the starting point of the sentence. This mechanism allows for a strong cohesion, displaying an informative given-new progression. In addition, preverbal nouns with predicate value can be modified by many types of phrases (adjectival and prepositional phrases, relative and participial clauses).