Acknowledgements

This monograph is based on work carried out at the Université de Genève (Switzerland), first supported by the Encouragement de projets (Div. I-III) funds (Swiss National Science Foundation project n° 156160, ‘Optional wh-in situ in French interrogatives: Syntax and prosody’) and then completed during my time at the University of Cambridge, supported by an Early PostDoc.Mobility grant (SNSF project n° 184384, ‘The fine structure of Romance interrogative it-clefts’).

First and foremost, I wish to gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, without which none of this would have been possible. Likewise, I wish to thank my research team in Geneva, namely my doctoral advisors Professor Ur Shlonsky and Professor Giuliano Bocci, and my dear colleague Lucas Tual. I also wish to thank my post-doctoral advisor at Cambridge, Professor Adam Ledgeway, who has enthusiastically encouraged and assisted me in the development of my doctoral dissertation into this book. Although this book is the outcome of work carried out in collaboration with all the members of these research groups, it is completely my own, and I take full responsibility for the ideas defended here.

I then wish to thank all of my informants, for taking the time to answer my questions and to discuss the trickiest phenomena with me…over and over again. Most of the Trevisan data presented and discussed in this book were gathered during the first and second year of my PhD, first in the form of my personal native judgements, and then through two likert-scale questionnaires and multiple old-fashioned sessions of one-to-one grammaticality judgements. Without these fine people, many fascinating phenomena related to Northern Italian wh-in situ would have gone unnoticed.

The content of this work has also been greatly influenced by comments and criticisms from a number of outstanding linguists. First are the other members of my doctoral scientific committee: Professors Guglielmo Cinque, Cecilia Poletto, Adam Ledgeway, and Adriana Belletti. The comments and suggestions you made during and after my defence were very valuable, and contributed substantially to the development of this work. I also wish to acknowledge the phenomenal influence that work by some other brilliant linguists has had on my own work over the years: that of Professors Giuliana Giusti, Anna Cardinaletti, Alessandra Giorgi, Nicola Munaro and Luigi Rizzi, all of whom were my mentors during my years in Venice and Geneva. I owe you almost everything I know about linguistics.

The most crucial support, however, has come from my daughter, Isadora, and from my partner in crime, Vincent. Without them, none of this would have been possible.