The Doubly Filled Comp in the dialect of Bagolino and Ponte Caffaro

The present research investigates the phenomenon of Doubly Filled Comp (DFC) in the dialect of Bagolino and Ponte Caffaro, two varieties belonging to Northern Italian Dialects. The DFC consists of the co-occurrence of the complementiser "che" with an interrogative pronoun. Specifically, the study focuses on determining the triggering factors of DFC, precisely clausal type, verbal morphology and the nature of the Wh-element (RQ1), the constraints or pragmatic contexts which trigger DFC instead of clefting (RQ2) and whether "che" can be categorised as a complementiser or as part of a relative clause (RQ3). This study has been carried out through an adapted version of Questionnaire 2 of the Syntactic Atlas for the Northern Italian Dialects (ASIt), which was orally administered to 20 native speakers, equally divided between the two villages. The data collected were then analysed and compared to previous literature on the left periphery of interrogatives and to a corpus created ad hoc for the present purpose. The findings revealed that DFC does exist in the dialect of Bagolino and Ponte Caffaro, although it is mainly realised in embedded contexts and it highly depends on the nature of the interrogative element. For example, "why" never appears within DFC, while "how much" is the most consistent item, forming a hierarchy of triggering elements. Verbal morphology does not have an influence on the phenomenon, since it is visible both in simple and compound tense clauses. With regard to RQ2, the data also show that DFC and clefting are in a complementary distribution, therefore, they are realised in different contexts. Furthermore, the findings do not provide enough evidence to precisely answer the third research question. It would have been interesting to administer a further questionnaire concerning relative clauses to all participants in order to understand the classification of "che". However, this open question provides an interesting and crucial path for future syntactic research. In conclusion, the study underlines that dialects are not static. They constantly undergo social and historical developments resulting in a high degree of idiolectal variation.