Work

Interfacing information and prosody

Year: 2012

Type: book-chapter

Abstract: We present experimental evidence bearing on Cheng and Rooryck’s (2000) proposal that French wh-in-situ questions are licensed by an intonational morpheme also present in yes-no questions and their claim that such questions are ungrammatical without a rising contour. While most participants produced a rising contour, not all did; when they did, the slope was not as steep as in yes-no questions. Our findings support C&R’s proposal, admitting the central role of information structure. We support a view of question formation in French in which information structure, syntax, and prosody form a tight relationship: the shape of the syntactically-designated contour is affected by pragmatic information. We present a theoretical account appealing to movement through givenness-marking that explains the observed pitch compression. Keywords: wh-questions; French interrogatives; prosody; information structure; givenness

Source: Romance languages and linguistic theory

DOI: 10.1075/rllt.4.07dep

Authors: Viviane Déprez, Kristen Syrett, Shigeto Kawahara

Institutions: Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W2541669855

FWCI:

Cites: 20

Cited by: 4

Related to: 10