The nature of complementizers

Italian che introduces finite declaratives and finite relatives, as does English that. However che also introduces finite and non-finite interrogatives with the meaning of „what‟ , while „who‟ is lexicalized by chi. Furthermore che can appear as the wh-determiner of complex interrogative NP‟s .One possibility that we can reject is that che in Italian simply has two lexical entries one of which corresponds to the „that‟ complementizer and the other to the „what‟ wh-element. This straightforward solution cannot have any explanatory value, given that the pattern that it describes is not an accidental coincidence observed in one (or even a few) dialect(s), but a systematic phenomenon in Romance languages. For instance in French, que introduces finite sentences and relatives, leading to its identification with the finite complementizer of the language (Kayne 1976), but also interrogatives with the value of „what‟.