Postverbal subjects and nuclear pitch accent in Italian wh-questions

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 Sec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFrom Sounds to Structures Vol. 135; pp. 467 - 494
Main Authors Bocci, Giuliano, Cruschina, Silvio
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin/Boston De Gruyter 2018
De Gruyter, Inc
Subjects
Italian Dialectology
LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS
Language and Linguistics
Linguistics
Morpho-phonology
Morpho-syntax
Phonetics, phonology
Phonetics, phonology, prosody (speech)
Phonology
thema EDItEUR
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Summary: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.
ISBN:9781501515347
1501506633
1501515349
9781501506635
DOI:10.1515/9781501506734-017