Bareness in Wh-Operators and Syntactic Intervention: Evidence from Sluicing in Child Italian

This study investigates the role of bareness, i.e. absence of the lexical NP restriction, in the computation of featural Relativized Minimality (fRM; Rizzi 2004; 2013; 2018). By comparing the syntactically bare wh-pronoun chi ‘who’ with the PF-bare quale ‘which one’ and the overtly lexically restricted quale+NP ‘which+NP’ in Italian sluiced embedded wh-questions, we aimed to verify whether syntactic of phonological bareness counts for fRM in A-bar dependencies, and in turn to what extent the locality principle is independent of pronunciation. 102 preschool children were administered a Yes/No-question task, adapted from Mateu and Hyams (2021) to Italian. Our results show that intervention effects that arise in object sluices are not uniform across all wh-types, but their strength vary systematically as a function of the structural properties of the wh-operator. Specifically, we found that object sluices with the syntactically bare wh-element chi were significantly more accurate than those with the lexically restricted quale+NP. This amelioration is again expected under fRM: when chi [+Q] crosses a lexically restricted subject DP [+NP], a disjunction configuration arises, as no relevant feature is shared between the two. Conversely, when quale+NP [+Q, +NP] crosses the same intervener, featural overlap obtains, yielding an inclusion configuration which, in turn, is more penalized for children. Strikingly, the PF-bare wh-element quale exhibits a distinct pattern from both the syntactically bare chi and the lexically restricted quale+NP. Crucially, quale does not trigger the amelioration effect observed with chi in object sluices, indicating that it fails to create a disjunction configuration. This suggests that, despite its surface bareness, quale does not count as bare for fRM: it projects an NP layer in the syntax and thus carries the featural specification [+Q, +NP]. Consequently, when quale crosses a lexically restricted subject DP [+Q, +NP], the featural overlap creates an inclusion configuration, just as with quale+NP. Hence, from a fRM perspective, quale patterns with quale+NP, demonstrating that the locality principle is purely structural, blind to PF-properties and sensitive to the internal architecture of wh-elements.