Abstract
This article deals with Italian questions with a post-verbal wh-element, which are generally defined as in situ. We show that post-verbal wh-questions can be interpreted as information-seeking questions, and provide syntactic arguments supporting the hypothesis that the post-verbal wh-element is only apparently in situ. We claim that, in certain contexts, the post-verbal wh-element undergoes a syntactic movement targeting a low-peripheral focus position dedicated to the expression of informational focus. We integrate our analysis with the examination of a number of cases of low-peripheral wh-elements from the CLIPS and LIP corpora of spoken Italian. As for prosody, the available data show that a sentence-final wh-element carries the nuclear accent of the utterance. Moreover, low-peripheral wh-questions seem pragmatically more restricted compared to their counterparts with a fronted wh-. Although further investigation may reveal additional contexts for the questions at stake, low-peripheral wh-questions need to be linked to the preceding discourse context and can be used to add emphasis to the missing piece of information represented by the wh-element.
Our low-peripheral analysis complements the current left-peripheral analysis of Italian wh-questions: wh-elements in left and low periphery display different interpretive and prosodic properties, indicating that they are involved in different phenomena. The results of this study also support the view that the low periphery is more subject to pragmatic restrictions compared to the left periphery.
References
Anderson, Anne H., Miles Bader, Ellen Gurman, Elizabeth Boyle, Gwyneth Doherty, Simon Garrod, Stephen Isard, Jacqueline Kowtko, Jan McAllister, Jim Miller, Catherine Sotillo, Herny S. Thompson & Regina Weinert. 1991. The HCRC map task corpus. Language and Speech 34. 351–366.10.1177/002383099103400404Search in Google Scholar
Badan, Linda & Claudia Crocco. 2018. Focus in Italian echo wh-questions: An analysis at syntax-prosody interface. Probus 31(1). 29–73.10.1515/probus-2017-0011Search in Google Scholar
Badan, Linda, Stella Gryllia & Gaetano Fiorin. 2017. Italian echo-questions at the interface. Studia Linguistica 71(3). 205–367.10.1111/stul.12048Search in Google Scholar
Bazzanella, Carla. 1995. I segnali discorsivi. In Lorenzo Renzi, Giampaolo Salvi & Anna Cardinaletti (eds.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione III, 225–257. Bologna: Il Mulino.Search in Google Scholar
Bazzanella, Carla. 2005. Parlato dialogico e contesti di interazione. In Klaus Hölker & Christiane Maaß (eds.), Aspetti dell’italiano parlato, 1–22. Münster: LIT-Verlag.Search in Google Scholar
Belletti, Adriana. 1999. “Inversion” as focalization and related questions. Catalan Working Papers in Linguistics 7. 9–45.Search in Google Scholar
Belletti, Adriana. 2001. Inversion as focalization. In Aafke Hulk & Jean Yves Pollock (eds.), Subject inversion in romance and the theory of universal grammar, 60–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Belletti, Adriana. 2004. Structures and beyond: The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 3. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Belletti, Adriana & Ur Shlonsky. 1995. The order of verbal complements: A comparative study. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 13. 489–526.10.1007/BF00992739Search in Google Scholar
Benincà, Paola & Cecilia Poletto. 2004. Topic, focus and V2: Defining the CP sublayers. In Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The structure of CP and IP. The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 2, 52–75. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina. 2019. Spelling out focus‐fronting chains and wh‐Chains: The case of Italian. Syntax 22(3). 146–161.10.1111/synt.12173Search in Google Scholar
Bocci, Giuliano. 2013. The syntax-prosody interface from a cartographic perspective: Evidence from Italian. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.204Search in Google Scholar
Bonan, Caterina & Ur Shlonsky. 2017. “Why” in situ in Northern Italian dialects. In Paper presented at the 50th SLE meeting, 10–13 September. Zurich, Switzerland: University of Zurich.Search in Google Scholar
Bošković, Željko. 2001. On the nature of the syntax-phonology interface: Cliticization and related phenomena. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.10.1163/9780585474250Search in Google Scholar
Bošković, Željko. 2002. On multiple wh-fronting. Linguistic Inquiry 33. 351–383.10.1162/002438902760168536Search in Google Scholar
Büring, Daniel. 1997. The meaning of topic and focus: The 59th Street Bridge accent. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna. 2001. A second thought on emarginazione: Destressing vs. ‘right dislocation’. In Guglielmo Cinque & Giampaolo Salvi (eds.), Current studies in Italian syntax: Essays offered to Lorenzo Renzi, 117–135. Amsterdam: North Holland.10.1163/9780585473949_008Search in Google Scholar
Cheng, Lisa Lai Shen. 1997. On the typology of wh-questions. New York: Garland.Search in Google Scholar
Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen & Johan Rooryck. 2000. Licensing wh-in situ. Syntax 3. 1–19.10.1111/1467-9612.00022Search in Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In Ken Hale & Jay Keyser (eds.), The view from building 20, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads. A cross-linguistic perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780195115260.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert & Susan E. Brennan. 1991. Grounding in communication. In Lauren B. Resnick, John M. Levine & Stephanie D. Teasley (eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition, 127–149. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.10.1037/10096-006Search in Google Scholar
Corver, Norbert & Jairo Nunes. 2007. The copy theory of movement. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.107Search in Google Scholar
Crocco, Claudia & Linda Badan. 2016. L’hai messo dove, il focus? Un’analisi prosodica delle domande eco wh-. In Renata Savy & Iolanda Alfano (eds.), La fonetica nell’apprendimento delle lingue/Phonetics and language learning (Collana Studi AISV 2), 191–207. Milan: Officina 21.Search in Google Scholar
De Mauro, Tullio, Federico Mancini, Massimo Vedovelli & Miriam Voghera. 1993. Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato (LIP). Milan: Etaslibri.Search in Google Scholar
Donzelli, Giulia & Diego Pescarini. 2019. Tre tipi di wh in situ nei dialetti lombardi. In Annamaria Chilà & Alessandro De Angelis (eds.), Bollettino del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, 183–197. Palermo: Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani.Search in Google Scholar
Etxepare, Ricardo & Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria. 2005. Wh-phrases in-situ in Spanish: Scope and locality. Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 33. 9–34.10.4000/rlv.1238Search in Google Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara. 2000. The prosody of focus in Italian (and the syntax-phonology interface). Probus 11(2). 209–238.10.1515/prbs.1999.11.2.209Search in Google Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara & Roland Hinterhölzl. 2007. Types of topics in German and Italian. In Susanne Winkler & Kerstin Schwabe (eds.), On information structure, meaning and form, 87–116. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.100.07fraSearch in Google Scholar
Jayaseelan, Karattuparambil Achuthan. 2001. IP‐internal topic and focus phrases. Studia Linguistica 55(1). 39–75.10.1111/1467-9582.00074Search in Google Scholar
Jiménez, María Luisa. 1997. Semantic and pragmatic condition on word order in Spanish. Washington, DC: Georgetown University dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Kaiser, Georg & Stefano Quaglia. 2015. In search of wh-in-situ in Romance: An investigation in detective stories. In Ellen Brandner, Anna Czypionka, Constantin Freitag & Andreas Trotzke (eds.), Charting the landscape of linguistics. On the scope of Josef Bayer’s work, 92–103. Konstanz: Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS).Search in Google Scholar
Kato, Mary. 2019. Echo questions in Brazilian Portuguese. DELTA 35(1). 1–16.10.1590/1678-460x2019350104Search in Google Scholar
Manfred Krifka & Renate Musan (eds.). 2012. The expression of information structure (The Expression of Cognitive Categories 5). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110261608Search in Google Scholar
Ladd, Robert D. 2008[1996]. Intonational phonology, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511808814Search in Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511620607Search in Google Scholar
Lurà, Franco. 1987. Il dialetto del Mendrisiotto. Descrizione sincronica e confronto coll’italiano. Mendrisio-Chiasso: Edizioni Unione di Banche Svizzere.Search in Google Scholar
Marotta, Giovanna. 2002. L’intonation des énoncés interrogatifs ouverts dans l’italien toscan. [The intonation of open interrogative sentences in Tuscan Italian]. In Proceedings of the first international conference on speech prosody 2002. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence.Search in Google Scholar
Marzo, Stefania & Claudia Crocco. 2015. Tipicità delle costruzioni presentative per l’italiano neostandard. Revue Romane 50(1). 30–50.10.1075/rro.50.1.02croSearch in Google Scholar
Munaro, Nicola. 1995. On nominal wh-phrases in some North-Eastern Italian dialects. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 20. 69–110.Search in Google Scholar
Munaro, Nicola, Cecilia Poletto & Jean-Yves Pollock. 2001. Eppur si muove! On comparing French and Bellunese wh-movement. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 1(1). 147–180.10.1075/livy.1.07munSearch in Google Scholar
Nespor, Marina & Irene Vogel. 1986. Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris.Search in Google Scholar
Ndayiragije, Juvénal. 1999. Checking economy. Linguistic Inquiry 30(3). 399–444.10.1162/002438999554129Search in Google Scholar
Norrick, Neal R. 2009. Interjections as pragmatic markers. Journal of Pragmatics 41. 866–891.10.1016/j.pragma.2008.08.005Search in Google Scholar
Nunes, Jairo. 2004. Linearization of chains and sideward movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/4241.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Oushiro, Livia. 2011. Wh-interrogatives in Brazilian Portuguese: The influence of common ground. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17(2). 17.Search in Google Scholar
Pires, Acrisio & Heather Taylor. 2007. The syntax of wh-in-situ and common ground. In Proceedings from the annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, vol. 43(2). 201–215.Search in Google Scholar
Péan, Vincent, Sheila Williams & Maxine Eskénazi. 1993. The design and recording of icy, a corpus for the study of intraspeaker variability and the characterisation of speaking styles. Proceedings of the third European conference on speech communication and technology (EUROSPEECH ’93), 21–23 September, 627–630. Berlin, Germany.10.21437/Eurospeech.1993-152Search in Google Scholar
Poletto, Cecilia & Jean-Yves Pollock. 2005. On wh-clitics, wh-doubling and apparent wh-in-situ in French and some North Eastern Italian dialects. Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 33. 135–156.10.4000/rlv.1317Search in Google Scholar
Poletto, Cecilia & Jean-Yves Pollock. 2009. Another look at wh-questions in Romance. In Danièle Torck & W. Leo Wetzels (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2006: Selected papers from “Going Romance”, Amsterdam, 7–9 December 2006, 199–258. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/cilt.303.12polSearch in Google Scholar
Poletto, Cecilia & Laura Vanelli. 1995. Gli introduttori delle frasi interrogative nei dialetti italiani settentrionali. In Emanuele Banfi, Giovanni Bonfadini, Patrizia Cordin & Maria Iliescu (eds.), Italia Settentrionale: crocevia di idiomi romanzi. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, 145–158. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783110910346.145Search in Google Scholar
Reglero, Lara & Emma Ticio. 2013. A unified analysis of wh-in-situ in Spanish. The Linguistic Review 30(4). 501–546.10.1515/tlr-2013-0018Search in Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of grammar, 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.10.1007/978-94-011-5420-8_7Search in Google Scholar
Rosemeyer, Malte. 2018. The pragmatics of Spanish postposed wh-interrogatives. Folia Linguistica 52(2). 283–317.10.1515/flin-2018-0007Search in Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 1984. Phonology and syntax: The relation between sound and structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 2011. The syntax-phonology interface. In John Goldsmith, Jason Riggle & Alan Yu (eds.), The handbook of phonological theory. Oxford: Blackwell.10.1002/9781444343069.ch14Search in Google Scholar
Shiamizadeh, Zohreh, Johanneke Caspers & Niels O. Schiller. 2018. When is a wh-in-situ question identified in standard Persian? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 33(9). 1168–1183.10.1080/23273798.2018.1463444Search in Google Scholar
Stalnaker, Robert C. 2002. Common ground. Linguistics and Philosophy 25. 701–721.10.1023/A:1020867916902Search in Google Scholar
Stjepanovic, Sandra. 2003. Multiple wh-fronting in Serbo-Croatian matrix questions and the matrix sluicing construction. In Cedric Boeckx & Kleanthes K. Grohmann (eds.), Multiple wh-fronting, 255–284. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.64.14stjSearch in Google Scholar
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2007. The syntax phonology interface. In Paul de Lacy (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of phonology, 435–456. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486371.019Search in Google Scholar
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2012. On the prosody of German wh-questions. In Gorka Elordieta & Pilar Prieto (eds.), Prosody and meaning, 73–118. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110261790.73Search in Google Scholar
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2013. An analysis of prosodic F-effects in interrogatives: Prosody, syntax and semantics. Lingua 124. 131–175.10.1016/j.lingua.2012.06.003Search in Google Scholar
Uribe-Etxebarria, Maria. 2002. In situ questions and masked movement. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2(1). 217–257.10.1075/livy.2.09uriSearch in Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa. 1998. Prosody, focus, and word order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0059).
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
