The Italian Left Periphery: A View from Locality

In this article, I discuss the interaction of locality phenomena with the left periphery in Italian as elaborated in Rizzi 1997, 2001a, 2004b. It turns out that long-distance crossing possibilities fully predict the local orderings entailed by Rizzi’s left-peripheral template. In fact, both descriptive gains (in terms of topic positions) and explanatory gains (regarding the position and behavior of topics and of Rizzi’s (2001a) Int) can be made if local ordering is reduced to locality. This suggests that the left-peripheral template should be derived from some appropriate theory of locality and should not be taken as a theoretical primitive.