The cartography of the subject domain: On Object Fronting and Light Adverb Fronting in subject relatives and beyond

This paper discusses instances of fronting operations in Italian which display the same properties as Stylistic Fronting in Germanic and old Romance languages. Full DP objects, the two weak object pronouns attested in Italian, i.e., dative loro ‘to.them’ and demonstrative ciò ‘this’, and light adverbs may (optionally) appear in preverbal position in the lowest portion of the “subject domain”, as shown by the cases in which the fronted elements co-occur with preverbal subjects in embedded clauses different from subject relatives. The clausal area targeted by the fronted elements is delimited by the adverbs di solito ‘usually’, i.e., the lowest high adverb in Cinque’s (1999) hierarchy, and mica ‘not’, i.e., the highest low adverb in Ledgeway and Lombardi (2005) and Schifano (2018), and hosts what we call ‘intermediate adverbs’.