Specificational sentences and word order in Romance: A functional analysis.

It has often been claimed that certain verb-subject configurations can convey a specificational meaning, but it has not been previously shown that they can also have the same syntactico-semantic and discourse properties as other types of sentences which mainly have a specificational meaning, such as clefts and pseudoclefts. In this article I examine Verb Object Subject (VOS) word order in Romance, and show that it shares the syntactic and semantic properties of specificational sentences. I also provide a description of the discourse functions of VOS in French, Spanish and Italian, and conclude that these differ significantly in each of the three languages. I argue that such differences follow naturally from the specificational nature of VOS clauses, and reflect the different functional types of specificational sentences attested cross-linguistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]