Syntactic and prosodic effects of long-distance wh-movement in Italian

In this paper we discuss postverbal subjects in Italian direct wh-questions. We show that, in this context, subject inversion is not determined by the information-structural, semantic, or pragmatic conditions that rule ‘free’ subject inversion in declarative clauses: it is rather the consequence of a purely syntactic mechanism, namely, successive cyclic wh-movement, which directly affects the syntactic position of the subject, as well as the prosody of the sentence (in particular, the distribution of the nuclear pitch accent). We propose that the movement of the wh-element to the local CP inhibits the position SubjP, which hosts preverbal subjects in Italian. This syntactic restriction, we argue, is due to a case of relativized minimality: given that the preverbal subject would count as an intervener that blocks wh-movement, SubjP is not projected in the syntactic structure of wh-questions and the subject must obligatorily occur postverbally.