Luisa talking at NYU

On the decomposition of A-movement in the Valley of Aosta.

Friday October 21, Luisa Seguin gives a talk at the NYU Syntax Brown Bag series, on focus and wh-words in Valdôtain Patois, titled "Decomposing A’-movement: on clause internal wh-words and foci in Valdôtain Patois". The abstract is below.

In the cartographic literature (Rizzi 1997; Rizzi & Bocci 2017; Bonan 2019), foci and wh-words are assumed to be mutually exclusive. They carry a [FOCUS] feature and target the same position, FocP. This position is assumed to be available in two separate domains: the High Left Periphery (HLP) and Low Left Periphery (LLP) of a clause. In this talk, I will present data from the Franco-Provençal language Valdôtain Patois (ValPa), challenging this assumption. In ValPa, clause-internal wh-words and foci can co-occur. Wh-words occupy a dedicated A’-position at the edge of the LLP, while foci are in a lower position in the LLP. Thus, there are two A’-positions for wh-words, one in the LLP, the other, in HLP. I show that wh-words always move to the highest A’-position (in the HLP), but different word orders can occur as the result of a copy-deletion mechanism at PF (Bošković 2011). While wh-words and foci co-occur in the LLP, they cannot co-occur in the HLP. In the talk, I will address this difference and propose some tentative solutions to this puzzle.