This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY‎-NC‎-ND 4.0 International licence‎.‎ It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations‎.‎ This book provides an in‎-depth investigation of contrastive focalization in Italian‎,‎ showing that its syntactic expression systematically interacts with the syntactic expression of discourse‎-given phrases‎.‎ Vieri Samek‎-Lodovici disentangles the properties genuinely associated with contrastive focalization from those determined by highly productive operations affecting discourse given phrases in Italian‎,‎ namely right dislocation and marginalization‎.‎ Based on a vast aggregate of evidence‎,‎ he shows that in the default case contrastive focalization occurs in situ and that left‎-peripheral focalization patterns arise from the interaction with right dislocation and generalize well beyond the familiar cases examined in Rizzi ‎(‎1997‎)‎ and most literature since‎.‎In the final chapter‎,‎ the author examines how the key properties unveiled in the previous‎.‎‎.‎‎.‎