Focus in situ: Evidence from Portuguese

This paper deals with the issue of whether focused constituents in languages in which there is no overt focus movement should be raised to a focus position at the left periphery of the sentence in covert syntax. It is argued on the basis of evidence from the distribution of information focus in European Portuguese that such an Operation is both empirically inadequate and conceptually undesirable. The main argument comes from the fact that there are several overt Operations that take place in overt syntax to ensure that configurations that can be correctly mapped onto prosody are created. LF-movement would destroy such configurations and would be uneconomical, since it does no more than doubling the process of identifying foci.