Chapter Postverbal subjects and nuclear pitch accent in Italian wh-questions

• Main Author: Bocci, Giuliano (auth)
• Other Authors: Cruschina, Silvio (auth), Petrosino, Roberto (Editor), Cerrone, Pietro (Editor), van der Hulst, Harry (Editor)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Boston De Gruyter 2018
• Subjects: linguistics; Phonetics, phonology; Phonology; Morpho-phonology; Morpho-syntax; Italian Dialectology
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

The structure of this chapter is as follows. We first illustrate the phenomenon of subject inversion in Italian wh-questions (§ 2). In Section 3, we present the results of a syntactic experiment on the distribution of subjects in the embed-ded clause of wh-questions. Our analysis is presented in Section 4, where we directly relate the syntactic and prosodic peculiarities of Italian wh-questions to the successive cyclic nature and to the intermediate positions of wh-movement. We show that while subject inversion is a phenomenon that involves the edge of the C-phrase, the assignment of NPA additionally involves the vP-edge. We then attempt to capture the observed patterns and to provide further support to our analysis by comparing direct and indirect wh-questions with respect to both subject inversion and their prosodic properties (§ 5). A summary and some final remarks close the chapter.