Luisa in Glossa

Silent high copies in Alpine Arpitan.

Congratulations to Luisa Seguin, whose paper on medially-realized wh-movement in Valdôtain Patois has just been published in Glossa: "Choose me! Optionality in wh-fronting and copy deletion: Evidence for overt-covert movement in Valdôtain Patois." A language in the Franco-Provençal or Arpitan group, Valdôtain is spoken in the Aosta Valley, the least densely populated part of Italy, one of five regions granted home-rule in the Italian Constitution, and HQ to Luisa's family. In the language, wh-phrases can either be fronted or occur clause-internally. Those that are clause-internal, argues Luisa, are pronounced neither in their base position nor in their scope position, but rather in "the Low Left Periphery at the edge of vP." At the same time, "evidence from intervention effects, binding, inverse scope, and parasitic gaps" indicates that the scope position is occupied by a silent (phonetically 'covert') copy already in the syntactic representation that is pronounced (syntactically 'overt'). The theoretical consequences of such "overt covert movement" are explored in the paper, as well as the attached photo...