Abstract
This article compares the various strategies for expressing emphatic positive polarity and epistemic modality in the Romance languages. More specifically, it examines the lexical and syntactic mechanisms used in Catalan and Occitan for the expression of emphatic positive polarity and compares them with those of Spanish and French. The results indicate that Catalan and Occitan share both lexical strategies (the use of the particles bé/be, ben and pla/plan) and syntactic strategies (the non-focal fronting of quantified constituents). Furthermore, the study shows that the possibility of generating sentences with non-focal anteposition might act as an isogloss within Occitan dialects (specifically Gascon and Languedocien). This supports the assumption that Occitan serves as a bridge between Gallo-Romance and Ibero-Romance languages and highlights the importance of the notion of continuum in order to understand linguistic variation within the Romance languages.