Italian Echo‐Questions at the Interface

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.