Synchronic and diachronic clues on the internal structure of 'where' in Italo-Romance

In this article we try to identify the morphological formatives found across different Northern Italian dialects and to provide a first overview of the possible morphemes that can contribute to the compounding of the wh-item ‘where’. This wh-item displays a wide range of different crosslinguistic lexical realizations, allowing us to formulate a typology of possible formatives; moreover, the same lexical formatives occur in rather distant areas, which suggests that the ‘morphological pieces’ with which this wh-item is construed are recurrent across varieties. Our account is based on the (non-trivial) underlying assumption that each morphological formative corresponds to a functional projection, and that it is possible to reconstruct the internal layering of wh-words starting from their morphological composition.