CLAUSE TYPING IN MAIN POLAR QUESTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM ITALO‐ROMANCE

Abstract

This article investigates the morpho‐syntactic marking of main polar questions, which is achieved across Italo‐Romance by crosslinguistically different strategies. I argue that the interpretation of main polar questions is related to the activation of a dedicated functional head that encodes the relevant formal feature within the left‐periphery. In particular, I explore the possibility that the process of clause typing in unembedded yes/no questions is linked in Italo‐Romance to the activation of a functional projection located in the right periphery of the CP‐layer, which I call Polarity Phrase. This hypothesis relies on the intuition that negation and affirmation can be reduced to a more abstract category encoding the open polarity of the sentence, which can be underspecified for either negative or positive value.