This book offers a fresh account of word-order variation in main interrogative clauses introduced by the wh-item ‘why’ in Italian and Spanish, with particular reference to the positioning of the clausal subject. The work investigates some aspects of the syntax-discourse interface by exploring the interaction between information structural features and word order patterns, striving to widen our knowledge of how this interface works. The study adopts a comparative approach, contrasting systematically the data and the syntactic properties attested in the two languages; the research work carried out by the author is guided by a strongly empirical perspective, in the sense that the formal account proposed is adequately supported by a solid bulk of experimental evidence, which aims at pinning down the relevant factors determining the crosslinguistic variation attested. The book is well written and logically structured and the arguments flow coherently; the experimental section is adequately supported by a rich apparatus of tables and charts, so that the logical argumentation linking the general conclusions to the empirical and theoretical premises is certainly sound.

In what follows, I briefly summarize the content of each chapter, delaying a more general assessment of the work to the final part of the review.

In Chapter 1, the author addresses the threefold peculiarities of ‘why’: there are semantic, prosodic, and syntactic crosslinguistic properties that distinguish this wh-operator from other wh-words in the two Romance languages under analysis. From the semantic point of view, interrogative clauses introduced by ‘why’ can be distinguished in terms of their implicature, which is different from the one found in interrogative clauses introduced by other wh-items; from a prosodic point of view, the sentential stress of interrogatives introduced by why differs in the sense that only in this case does the main stress fall on the wh-item; from a syntactic point of view, only in interrogatives introduced by ‘why’ can different lexical elements intervene between the wh-item and the inflected verb. In the author’s view, these peculiar properties make a deeper systematic investigation of ‘why’-interrogatives particularly desirable and even necessary, in particular with respect to the position of the subject.

Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive introductory section about the basic notions of word order, information structure, and wh-interrogatives in Italian and Spanish. By presenting some previous analyses of word order in the two languages, the author identifies SVO as the basic word order of both Italian and Spanish in declarative sentences; deviations from this order are possible, and even favoured, under certain circumstances, among which are the occurrence of particular verb classes and the presence of information structural factors. Regarding the latter, the author undertakes a detailed treatment of the basic relevant notions, identifying three dimensions of variation which include the focus-background opposition, the information status as new vs given, and the topic-comment dichotomy. A further section of the chapter is devoted to the complex interplay between different word order patterns and information structure in the two languages, and to the various syntactic accounts that have been proposed within the cartographic framework in order to explain subject positioning. Finally, the basic syntactic properties of main wh-interrogatives are presented, highlighting the slightly different layout of the left-periphery that must be assumed in the two languages, with Spanish displaying a left-peripheral functional sequence slightly reduced with respect to the Italian one.

Chapter 3 tackles more specifically the syntactic properties of ‘why’-interrogatives, pointing out the possibility for ‘why’ to be separated from the inflected verb by intervening lexical material, such as the subject, a focalized or a topicalized constituent, and adverbial elements; this suggests an analysis in terms of external merge of ‘why’ in the specifier of a dedicated left-peripheral functional projection at least for Italian, but less obviously so for Spanish. Particular attention is devoted to middle vocatives as potentially intervening elements between ‘why’ and the verb and presumably lexicalizing their own projection within the left periphery. After reviewing some further crosslinguistic peculiarities of ‘why’, the author moves on to address the question of whether subject positioning in Italian and Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives differs, identifying three main relevant factors, namely the information-structural function of the subject, the heaviness of the subject, and the nominal vs pronominal nature of the subject.

In Chapter 4, the author presents in detail the experimental methodology adopted in the collection of the relevant empirical evidence on which the formal account proposed is based. This part of the work includes a parallel corpus study and a number of experimental studies. As to the former, it is used to investigate which elements can intervene between ‘why’ and the verb and the theoretical implications for the syntactic structure of the left periphery; moreover, it aims to identify potential differences in subject positioning in the two languages and to determine which factors in particular affect the position of the subject. The experimental studies include some acceptability judgment tasks (on intervening vocatives, information structure in transitive constructions and the syntactic heaviness of the subject in Spanish), a forced-choice experiment on information structure in transitive constructions, and a production task on information structure in transitive constructions.

Some of the results of the parallel corpus study and of two experimental studies presented in the previous chapter are discussed in Chapter 5, reaching the conclusion that subjects are the most frequent intervening elements in both languages, and that preverbal subjects occur more frequently in Italian than in Spanish; other potential intervening elements include adjuncts, dislocated objects and particles, with a similar frequency in both languages. As for intervening middle vocatives, these are grammatical both in Italian and Spanish in interrogatives introduced by ‘why’ or d-linked wh-elements, but not in interrogatives introduced by bare wh-items. In the author’s view the fact that different lexical elements can intervene between ‘why’ and the verb provides an important argument for the assumption that a separate IntP hosting ‘why’ does exist also in the Spanish left-periphery (situated between the TopP hosting preceding topics and the lower projections hosting intervening topics or middle vocatives), as has already been proposed for Italian.

Chapter 6 contains the results of different empirical studies aiming at highlighting the differences between Italian and Spanish with respect to subject positioning in ‘why’-interrogatives. The three main relevant factors identified above (the information-structural function of the subject, the phonological and syntactic heaviness of the subject, and the nominal vs pronominal nature of the subject) are separately taken into account. The data suggest that in Italian focus even determines the position of the subject in ‘why’-interrogatives, but this influence also depends on verb type and object realization; on the other hand, in Spanish focus has only a reduced effect on subject positioning in clauses with a transitive verb and a nominal object. As for the heaviness of the subject, no effect is detected in Italian, whereas in Spanish heavy subjects seem to occur more frequently in preverbal position than in postverbal position. Finally, as for the relevance of subject type, a minor effect is attested in Italian, where pronominal subjects appear more frequently in postverbal position, while in Spanish the effect is stronger, as subject pronouns (unlike nominal subjects) tend to occupy the postverbal position regardless of other factors.

The first part of Chapter 7 offers an overview of the advantages and drawbacks of four different previous syntactic accounts of word order variation in Italian and Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives, showing how each of these explanatory proposals reveals some problematic aspects. Eventually, the author puts forth an alternative feature-based account that is compatible with the empirical results presented in the previous chapters. This approach is based on the assumption that the functional articulation of the left-periphery is different in the two languages, as in Italian left-peripheral features are scattered, with each feature heading a projection, while in Spanish some features are bundled together; as a consequence, Spanish has a less articulated left-periphery than Italian. Moreover, in Spanish constituents other than the subject bearing a special discourse status can satisfy the EPP-feature which is attached to the discourse features located in FinP; on the contrary, in Italian the EPP-features in the higher discourse projections are independent of the EPP-feature in FinP, which forces subject raising to TP, a position that inherits all uninterpretable features (among which EPP) from Fin. However, since the merge position of ‘why’ is higher than Fin (and only in Fin can the relevant EPP-feature be attached to another feature), an additional assumption is necessary, namely that in Spanish not only the discourse features but also the wh-feature can attract the EPP-feature in Fin, leaving the subject in situ (more generally, in Spanish all discourse features, even those above Fin, can satisfy the EPP-feature); in Italian, on the other hand, where focus features and the wh-feature are located in a separate projection FocP above FinP, the EPP-feature of Fin cannot be satisfied by a focalized constituent or a wh-phrase, so that the subject has to raise to Spec,TP for this purpose (followed in turn by verb-raising to Foc°, which yields subject-verb inversion).

In Chapter 8 the author presents the results of an experimental task about the positioning of the subject in Italian ‘why’-interrogatives with focalized and non-focalized subjects; Italian heritage speakers (with German as dominant language) are compared with Italian monolinguals in terms of their ratings of three different word order patterns. The sequence with preverbal subject with both focal and non-focal subjects is rated similarly by monolinguals and heritage speakers, which indicates that adult heritage speakers acquire the use of preverbal subjects (although the relevant sequence with non-focal subjects is judged significantly lower by heritage speakers than by the monolingual group). For the two alternative word orders, no difference is detected between heritage speakers and monolingual speakers; hence, on the whole, one can conclude that heritage speakers accept the different patterns with focal and non-focal subjects to a similar extent as monolinguals, the only difference being observed with preverbal non-focal subjects.

Chapter 9 contains some concluding remarks.

The strength of this research work lies mainly in the solid empirical basis provided by the experimental studies carried out by the author, which lend strong support to the descriptive generalizations formulated as well as to the theoretical proposal put forth in Chapter 7. In particular, the author succeeds in identifying the relative relevance of three different factors (the information-structural function of the subject, the phonological and syntactic heaviness of the subject, and the nominal vs pronominal nature of the subject) in the determination of subject positioning in ‘why’-interrogatives. Moreover, the author provides convincing empirical arguments for the hypothesis that ‘why’ is externally merged in a dedicated syntactic position, which is higher than the one hosting other wh-items; to this purpose, she also investigates a still largely unexplored construction, namely interrogatives containing middle vocatives. All of these factual results are achieved thanks to an extremely detailed experimental apparatus and a coherent line of argumentation in which the author systematically and exhaustively takes into account previous existing proposals that are thoroughly presented and carefully evaluated in their predictive power. The formal account of the different word order patterns attested in Spanish and Italian is developed in the framework of the cartographic approach, assuming a range of crosslinguistic variation in the functional architecture of the left-peripheral region of clause structure, more precisely in the lexicalization and/or realization of different formal features and in their checking process. This assumption poses a challenge to one of the basic tenets of cartography, namely that each formal feature is encoded in a different functional head of the structural layout of the clause, thus leaving room for deviations from the more orthodox vision of clausal architecture.

On the whole, this work represents a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the syntactic properties of wh-interrogatives as well as of the left-peripheral portion of the clause in the two Romance languages under analysis, both from the empirical and from the theoretical point of view. Furthermore, this book confirms the validity of a comparative approach to the study of the principles underlying the language faculty, deepening considerably our understanding of the syntax-discourse interface and, in particular, of the relation between information-structural factors and word order variation.