Signor Presidente, sono due anni che aspettiamo: la scissa durativa italiana in un confronto interlinguistico sul corpus multilingue EUROPARL

The article focuses on the Italian temporal cleft sentence ("sono due anni che aspettiamo"). The analysis is based on the Italian section of the parallel corpus EUROPARL (60 mln tokens) which gathers the proceedings of the European Parlament. Italian temporal clefts are discussed both from a structural and a functional point of view. Whether temporal clefts can be considered a type of cleft sentence is discussed on the basis of criteria such as giveness and focus. Furthermore, their discourse function has been identified. Finally, a brief contrastive comparison with English temporal clefts from the corresponding section of the Europarl corpus has been carried out.