Italian wh-questions and the low periphery

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.

A contrastive perspective on French and Italian wh-in situ questions

“…In his own words: "There is a categorical association between in situ and an explicit activation pragmatic value when the in situ represents less than 1% of occurrences of wh-questions" (Larrivée 2019: 126). If this principle can be extended to other languages, such as Italian, in which in situ seem to have an extremely low frequency (Badan & Crocco 2021;Kaiser & Quaglia 2015),…”

“…Of these 19 occurrences, 4 were drawn from the Corpora Linguistici per l'Italiano Parlato e Scritto (CLIPS), 'Linguistic Corpora for Spoken and Written Italian' (www.clips.unina.it; last access: 05.06.2021), containing task-oriented interactions gathered by map tasks and spot-the-difference tasks and whose size is estimated to be about 72,400 graphic words. The other 15 examples were extracted from the Lessico di frequenza dell'Italiano Parlato (LIP), 'Frequency Lexicon of Spoken Italian' (badip.uni-graz.at/it/corpuslip/descrizione; last access: 05.06.2021), including dialogical and monological speech recorded in several contexts and containing about 490,000 words.5 For the sake of simplicity, the transcription conventions used inBadan & Crocco (2021) were omitted.…”

Mica preposing as focus fronting

“…Alternatively, if we want to justify the non-corrective focus meaning associated with mica, we can resort to a low focus projection in the low periphery (à la Belletti 2004). According to Belletti, the vP Left Periphery possesses a specialized projection for new information focus, an interpretation which is not available in the periphery of CP (see Poletto & Bocci 2016;Badan & Crocco 2021 for a review on low focus). For the current discussion, we can dispense of a low focus movement for contrastive mica, since its interpretive effects are already present in the numeration of FAIP and do not need movement.…”