Word order variation in Spanish and Italian interrogatives. The role of the subject in ‘why’-interrogatives. (original) (raw)
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Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos
In this paper, we investigate the effect of information structure on word order in Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives, and whether these two languages differ from each other. To this end, we conducted two empirical studies. In a parallel text corpus study, we compared the frequency of the word order patterns ‘why’SV and ‘why’VS, as well as the distribution of focal and non-focal subjects in the two languages. In order to get a deeper understanding of the impact of the information structural categories focus and givenness on word order in ‘why’-interrogatives, we conducted a forced-choice experiment. The results indicate that word order is affected by focus in Italian, while it is not determined by any information structural category in Peninsular Spanish. We show that Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives differ from each other in two ways. First, non-focal subjects occur preverbally in Italian, while they occupy the postverbal position in Peninsular S...
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Postverbal subjects and main prominence in Italian wh-questions *
2019
Ad Andrea, per tutto quello che ci ha insegnato, trasmesso e cucinato * We would like to thank Valentina Bianchi and Lucia Pozzan for invaluable help and discussion. Giuliano Bocci's research was supported by the ERC Advanced Grant 340297 SynCart. 1 Note that the two generalizations do not hold for Italian yes/no-questions. Even if it used to be a feature of Old Italian (cf. Munaro 2010), modern Italian yes/no-questions do not require subject inversion, either in the matrix or in an embedded clause; nor do they display any special prosodic pattern with respect to the placement of NPA.
An Excursion Into Interrogatives in Early English and Italian
Journal of Multivariate Analysis
We investigate the production of subject and object who-and which-questions in the Italian of 4to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that different avoidance strategies are attempted by the child to get around this interference, all boiling down to a double checking of agreement: AGREE and Spec-Head. Then, we evaluate our approach from a cross-linguistic perspective and offer an account of the differences observed across early languages. Because our account seems to call both for a grammatical and a processing explanation, we end with a critical discussion of this dichotomy.
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We investigate the production of subject and object who-and which-questions in the Italian of 4to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that different avoidance strategies are attempted by the child to get around this interference, all boiling down to a double checking of agreement: AGREE and Spec-Head. Then, we evaluate our approach from a cross-linguistic perspective and offer an account of the differences observed across early languages. Because our account seems to call both for a grammatical and a processing explanation, we end with a critical discussion of this dichotomy.