Prepositional “where” in Southern Italian Dialects

Abstract

This chapter investigates a phenomenon attested in some Southern Italian varieties, where a form identical to the wh-item meaning “where” can be used as a locative preposition. Since most of the dialects considered here only use P-where in cases of quasi-inalienable locative possession, this chapter adopts the recent proposal that the structural configuration of inalienable possession is to be interpreted as a RelatorP whose predicative head functions as the relator between the possessor, located in the specifier position, and the possessee, that is, the locative noun, sitting in the complement position. It also proposes that P-where exploits a sort of reduced relative in which the null classifier-like element PLACE located in the internal structure of the wh-item undergoes raising to the highest functional specifier; the reduced relative clause is taken to occupy the specifier of a bigger small clause, whose complement is represented by the RelatorP containing the actual lexical nouns.