The Italian marker eccetto is ambiguous between an exceptive marker
and an exclusive marker. When it co-occurs with a universal quantifier, it
is has an exceptive reading and removes the exception from the domain of
the quantifier. Furthermore, these constructions are underlyingly clausal
and involve ellipsis. On the other hand, when eccetto co-occurs with an ex-
istential quantifier, a numeral, or a wh-phrase, it is phrasal and receives an
exclusive interpretation. Syntactically, exclusive eccetto constructions are
base-generated in the high left periphery of the clause and display the same
distribution as Hanging Topics. Semantically, they do the exact opposite
of Hanging Topics. I propose a discourse-level analysis of these construc-
tions: exclusive eccetto introduces a presupposition that the exclusion is not
in the set of available entities in the discourse.