Headless relatives in some Old Italian varieties

Old Italian had a system of wh pronouns with Case distinctions, which has been lost in modern Italian. Observing wh pronouns in relative clauses of early Florentine, in particular Headless Relatives (HR), allows us to understand some interesting characteristics of this construction, which are worth comparing with other early and modern varieties of Italy. The literature on relative clauses in general and on HR in particular is vast; in this paper I present a merely descriptive account, leaving other comparisons (in particular with English) and a theoretical discussion for future occasions. For HR I assume an essential structure, adapted from Cinque (2003), which, in its simplicity, is compatible with the classic model based on Chomsky (1977) and incorporates the theory of silent elements of Kayne (2005): (1) [DP _ [CP who THAT you saw]] [DP _ [CP what THAT you saw]] This scheme takes sides with respect to the much-debated problem of the location of the wh and the 'emptiness' of the DP head: the wh is in a Spec of CP and the antecedent is empty (the other possibility, with a wh pronoun as the head of DP, is represented by particular types of HR, as convincingly shown by Battye 1989). OItal. HR show that the case is assigned to the wh exclusively by the verb of the relative clause. The comparison of Old and Modern Italian show that the relevance of Case matching is different in different languages. A comparison with English, whose wh case system is very similar to OItal., could lead to more precise hypotheses. In both these languages, moreover, a complementiser can appear after the wh: its role could be compared to that of the suffix –unque (English –ever), which builds an indefinite pronoun: a proposal developed by Battye (1989), who uncovers two possible structures for HR, could help to analyse this phenomenon and other aspects of HR. The relevance of copular sentence structures also deserve further, more detailed, explorations. The relation between HR and indirect questions explains some apparent exceptions to interrogative syntax; this relation opened a way to interrogative wh forms to become part of the relative pronoun paradigm, in English and in OItal.