Le anteposizioni topicalizzanti in francese. Note informativo-testuali e interpuntive

The analysis, based on a 150.000 words corpus of French newspaper articles published online1, aims at establishing the morphosyntactic, punctuational, informational and textual properties of constructions with syntactic fronting, i.e. characterized by an argument that is brought to the front of the clause without being referred back by a clitic pronoun. The results are remarkable. From an informational-textual point of view, the construction shows a very regular behavior: the fronted element is always associated to a topic (vs. focus); the topic is mainly given and always “linearized”; its textual function almost always consists in a thematic connection between two text spans thanks to the topic, and in intro-ducing thanks to the end-focus a new referent that is developed in the right co-text. As for punctuation, the presence and absence of the comma after the fronted element show an equal distribution, and no formal or informational-textual explanation can be provided.