This monograph offers an innovative understanding of the mechanisms involved in Romance ‘optional’ wh-in situ. New supporting evidence in favour of Cable’s (2010) Grammar of Q is presented, as well as novel implementations of his original theory. In particular, it is claimed that wh-in situ idioms are characterised not only by language-specific choices between Q-projection and Q-adjunction, and between overt and covert movement of Q, but also in terms of the locus where they check the features relevant to wh-questions: while some languages check both [q] and [focus] in C, others make use of the clause-internal vP-periphery to check [focus]. Thanks to the vast amount of data presented and discussed, along with the predictions and theoretical contributions made, this monograph will be of interest to a wide range of specialists in human language, from typologists to Romance specialists and formal syntacticians, but also to the many experts in languages with overt Q-particles who wonder why Romance specialists have long been so resistant to the implementation of silent Q-particles in their theoretical models.

This paper explores a methodology for bias quantification in transformer-based deep neural network language models for Chinese, English, and French. When queried with health-related mythbusters on COVID-19, we observe a bias that is not of a semantic/encyclopaedical knowledge nature, but rather a syntactic one, as predicted by theoretical insights of structural complexity. Our results highlight the need for the creation of health-communication corpora as training sets for deep learning.

The mainstream literature on the Romance dialects of northern Italy has explained the morphosyntax of clause-internal wh-elements in answer-seeking interrogatives as either the result of interrogative movement into the lower portion of the high left periphery (Munaro et al. 2001, Poletto & Pollock 2015, a.o.), or as a canonical instance of scope construal (Manzini & Savoia 2005;2011). New empirical evidence from Romance suggests that there is more at stake in the computation of wh-interrogatives than we used to think, and that neither of the existing approaches to northern Italian 'wh-in situ' can be maintained. Here, I argue that northern Italian dialects and Asian languages are, at least in this respect, more similar than we originally thought, and then I offer a new, derivationally economic and cross-linguistically supported understanding of the morphosyntax of northern Italian wh-in situ: the theory of WH-TO-FOC. Accordingly, all cross-linguistic core properties of this phenomenon can be attributed to different combinations of the setting of universal micro-parameters related to the interrogative movement of wh-elements.

a.o.) and is not expected to surface clause-internally ('in situ'), yet it does in Trevisan, a Venetan dialect. In this paper, we present and discuss the different distributional properties of the two truth-conditionally equivalent why-words of Trevisan, parché and parcossa, and argue that their different distributional properties can be explained in terms of different external-merge sites, i.e., left-peripheral and TP-internal, respectively.

In the last five decades, French wh in-situ has been the center of much work in theoretical linguistics. Nonetheless, scholars still disagree on the distribution of these constructions, and on their interpretation. While whether or not wh in-situ is necessarily presuppositional has been debated for years (Cheng & Rooryck 2000, Baunaz 2011, Shlonsky 2012, a.o.), we believe this question is too narrow. Here, we investigate the ESLO 1-2 corpora of spoken French and provide a fresh understanding of in-situ questions based on the notion of ‘discourse activation’ (Dryer 1996, Larrivée 2019a, Garassino 2022). By demonstrating both the passage from a predominantly ex-situ system to a predominantly in-situ system, and a significant augmentation of non-context-bound in-situ occurrences, we redefine the conditions under which these structures are licenced in Hexagonal French, and how they have evolved from a micro-diachronic perspective (1970s-2010s).