Free choice free relative clauses in Italian and Romanian

Abstract

This paper aims to bring back to the linguistic scene a largely neglected character that is encountered in Italian and Romanian. This character exhibits a novel combination of morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features that, separately, are already attested across languages. It looks like an embedded non-interrogative wh-clause introduced by a wh-phrase that is either made of or contains a wh-root with an affix: the suffix -unque in Italian or the prefix ori- in Romanian. We show that this construction exhibits the same morpho-syntactic properties as -ever free relative clauses in English and the same semantic and pragmatic properties as headed relative clauses introduced by the free choice determiner any in English. Therefore, we label our character a free choice free relative clause. We argue for a syntactic analysis of free choice free relative clauses as true free relatives rather than headed relatives and for a semantic analysis along the lines of some recent proposals about related free choice constructions. We also discuss the meaning of wh-words occurring in free choice free relatives and in related constructions and emphasize the importance of not taking for granted that morpho-syntactic identity necessarily coincides with semantic and pragmatic identity across languages.