Towards a Typology of wh-Doubling in Northern Italian Dialects

Abstract

In this work we examine the distribution of wh-in-situ and short (i.e., clause internal) wh-doubling in Northern Italian dialects with the purpose of showing that wh-in-situ and wh-doubling are not unitary phenomena, since they are subject to different distributional properties across dialects. We show that wh-doubling cannot be reduced to a single analysis but rather corresponds to a family of phenomena which have in common the basic procedure of feature doubling, within which the copying mechanism applies to different subsets or packages of features and is constrained in different ways. Furthermore, some types of doubling correspond in their distribution with some types of wh-in-situ, which shows that the two phenomena must be related and that different types of wh-in-situ are the null counterpart of different types of wh-doubling. However, in the languages in which wh-in-situ is generalized, wh-in-situ has nothing to do with wh-doubling.