Subject Focus and Argument Structure in Italian and Spanish

The elicitation of Information Focus (IF) remains a central challenge in linguistic research, particularly in crosslinguistic and multilingual settings. The standard method, the Question-Answer (QA) test, while widely employed, suffers from well-documented limitations. Specifically, in QA-based elicitation, fragment answers often obscure the syntactic and prosodic realization of IF (Merchant 2004; Krifka 2006), and even full responses may yield interpretive ambiguities, encoding contrastive or corrective readings rather than purely informational ones, thus reducing the reliability of the collected data. To address these methodological issues, Cruschina & Mayol (2022, 2024) propose the Question with a Delayed Answer (QDA) test, an adaptation of the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) used in prosodic research on Romance languages. By inserting intervening material between the wh-question and the response, the QDA encourages the spontaneous production of full, congruent sentences, thereby yielding syntactically transparent data. Building on this methodological innovation, the present paper investigates how IF interacts with argument structure in two pro-drop Romance languages, Italian and Spanish. Focusing on transitive and unaccusative verbs, we show that QDA-elicited data reveal systematic crosslinguistic differences: while Italian exhibits stronger constraints on postverbal subjects under IF, Spanish allows more flexibility. These findings have implications not only for the empirical description of Romance focus strategies but also for theoretical models of the syntax-information structure interface.