The left periphery in Bavarian Analysis of the Emphatic Topicalisation through the lens of the Doubly-filled COMP

This study investigates the structural position of simple wh-elements in a construction of the Bavarian left periphery, the Emphatic Topicalisation (ET). Following Weiß & Strobel’s (2018) proposal that there are correlations between different syntactic phenomena, the Doubly-filled COMP (DFC), another Bavarian structure, was analysed through data of the Zwirner-corpus. The results, supported by a comparison with other Germanic dialects and varieties, indicate that simple wh-items can co-occur with complementisers, suggesting they occupy SpecFinP rather than a head position. This leaves SpecTopP available for the extracted constituent in the ET.