Emphasis as reduplication: Evidence from sì che/no che sentences.

In this articleweinvestigate the syntax of Italian emphatic replies inwhich a polarity particle is followed by an embedded clauseintroduced 9 by the declarative complementizer che, which we label sì che/no che sentences.We propose that the relation between the polarity particle 10 and the clause introduced by che is mediated by the presence of a null operator, which binds a variable inside the clause, and that this 11 operator iswhatmakes othermovement operations impossible (along the lines of Haegeman, 2007, 2009, 2010b,a).Wefurther suggest that 12 sì che/no che sentences contain two copies of the triggering utterance: a null one in theHangingTopic position and an overt one in the clause 13 introduced by che, thus accounting for the observation that these sentences (a) cannot be embedded and (b) exhibit restrictions on their 14 content. The effect of emphasis is thus seen as stemming from a syntactic configuration that involves reduplication.