Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

The morphosyntax of wh-in situ in Northern Italian Dialects (NIDs) has been the subject of a long debate. Over the years, two major derivations have been proposed: one that takes NIDs to license wh-‘in situ’ through movement into a left peripheral specifier (Poletto & Pollock 2000 and further developments, Munaro et al. 2001), and one that takes Northern Italian sentence-internal wh-phrases to be unmoved (Manzini & Savoia 2005 and related works). 

In my work, I show that 'insituness' in NIDS displays rigid distributional patterns, and claim that it is possible to single out three different Types of varieties: Type I, which derive 'insituness' à la Poletto et al., Type II, whose sentence-internal wh-words are unmoved à la Manzini & Savoia, and Type III, which display short wh-movement.

Here, I first present novel data from Trevigiano, a Venetan dialect, then characterize the derivation of wh-in situ in Type III varieties, which I explain in terms of clause-internal wh-movement into the specifier of Belletti's (2004) Foc (implementing previous analyses by Kato 2003;2013, Belletti 2006 & Manzini 2014). Finally, I discuss some properties related to Wh-to-Foc: the legitimacy of an analysis of Trevisian wh-phrases as QPs à la Cable (2010), the nature of interrogative subject clitics, and the (problematic) status of subject clitic inversion.

References

Belletti, A. 2006. Clefts and wh in situ: some notes. Paper presented at the Lisbon 9 COST-Meeting. July 6-8, 2006. Ms.

Cable, S. 2010. The Grammar of Q. Q-Particles, Wh-Movement, and Pied-Piping. Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax.

Kato, M. (2013) Deriving ‘wh-in-situ’ through mouvement in Brazilian Portuguese. Information Structure and Agreement. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.

Manzini, M. R. (2014) Grammatical categories: Strong and weak pronouns in Romance. Lingua150. Elsevier.

Manzini, M. R. & L. M. Savoia (2005) I Dialetti Italiani e Romanci. Edizioni dell’Orso.

Munaro, N. & C. Poletto & J.-Y. Pollock (2001) Eppur si muove! In P. Pica & J. Roorick (eds.) Linguistic Variation Yearbook 1. John Benjamins.

Poletto, C. & J.-Y. Pollock (2000) On the Left Periphery of Some Romance Wh-Questions. University of Venice Working Papers in Linguistics (UVWPL).