Italian Echo‐Questions at the Interface

Abstract

This paper investigates the prosodic, semantic and syntactic properties of fronted wh‐echo questions (FWhEQs) in Italian, comparing them to information seeking wh‐questions (WhQs). Results from a production experiment showed that the two differ prosodically: FWhEQs start low, rise later (the pitch accent was realized on the verb participle) and end with a high boundary tone, whereas WhQs in most of the cases start with a rise, followed by a small plateau and end with a rise or a low F0. At the syntactic level we argue that a FWhEQ moves as a whole to the specifier of a TopicP within a higher superordinate ForceP. At the semantic level, we propose that FWhEQs differ from regular WhQs in that they express a meta speech act: with a FWhEQ the speaker asks the addressee to repeat an assertion. We formalize this idea arguing that the movement of the whole ForceP to a higher ForceP, together with the obligatory final rising intonation, activates a REQUEST operator in the superordinate ForceP. The REQUEST operator is a meta speech act as it applies to another speech act, rather than to a sentence radical.