On a (wh-)moved Topic in Italian, compared to Germanic

In this paper, I compare Romance and Germanic left periphery. I show that Italian Resumptive Preposing (RP) differs from both Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) and Focalization and shares many properties with fronting phenomena in English (Topicalization, Locative Inversion, Comparative Inversion). RP constituents are (wh-)moved to a high Topic position only available in root contexts and can co-occur with either preverbal pronominal subjects or post-verbal heavy subjects (while CLLD can target a Topic position lower than Focus – Rizzi 1997, Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl 2007 – and does not display any restriction on the subject). The analysis is based on Rizzi and Shlonsky’s (2006) account of English Locative Inversion and will lead us to the discussion of the interaction of Fin and Subj, i.e., the heads which lie at the interface of the I and C layers, and the comprehension of the different restrictions on the occurrence of preverbal subjects in Italian and English/German left-peripheral constructions, ultimately explaining the generalizations arrived at in Cardinaletti (2007).