Caterina Bonan holds a PhD in General Linguistics from the University of Geneva (Switzerland). Her research has focussed on Romance comparative syntax, dialectology, creolistics, syntactic theory, and linguistic change. Bonan’s doctoral dissertation (available here), defended in 2019, explored the morphosyntax of Northern Italian wh-questions, and she has since been working on an implementation of her theory of wh-in situ. Bonan is at present a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), where she works with Adam Ledgeway on a project supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, ‘The fine structure of Romance interrogative it-clefts’.
In this talk, I wish to discuss a number of occurrences of clause-internal wh-elements and low focalisations in Trevisan, a northern Italian dialect. These, I shall claim, have non-negligible consequences for the theory of Romance wh-in situ and, more generally, for our understanding of different instantiations of ‘focus’.
