Allora as an Italian discourse particle

Abstract

This article investigates the use of allora as an Italian discourse particle establishing a parallel with the German modal particle denn: both elements can namely be used in interrogative contexts to link the question in which they appear to the context and have a lot of phonological and syntactic properties in common calling for a unified treatment of these two elements. From a syntactic point of view however, Italian allora cannot be treated on a par with German denn for it has a different distribution within the clause: in fact, whereas denn always appears in the middle field of the clause just like most German modal particles, Italian allora can occur either sentence-initially or sentence-finally. Following previous works on sentence-initial and sentence-final discourse particles in Italian, I argue that the two instances of allora are not one and the same element and provide different syntactic analyses for both occurrences of this discourse particle: whereas sentence-initial allora is a CP-element sitting in the Force-domain, sentence-final allora is base-generated in the IP-area and ends up in the final position of the clause as a result of roll-up movement of the constituents that would otherwise follow the particle.