Publication

Journal	Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics
Publisher	Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Volume (Issue)	7(4)
Page(s)	1 - 59
Title of proceedings	Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics
DOI	10.5565/rev/isogloss.108

URL	https://revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/article/view/v7-bonan/pdf_26
Type of Open Access	Publisher (Gold Open Access)

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 Romancesuggests 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 thisphenomenon can beattributed to different combinations of the setting of universal micro-parameters related to the interrogative movement of wh-elements.