A recognition grammar to supply information to a text-to-speech system for the synthesis of Italian must rely heavily upon lexical information, in order to instantiate the appropriate grammatical relations. Italian is an almost free word order language which nonetheless adopts f a i r l y analysable strategies to move major constituents: some of these can strongly affect the functioning of the phonotogical component. Two basic claims w i l l be made: i. d i f f i c u l t i e s in associating grammatical functions to constituent structure can be overcome only i f.
