Italian Echo-Questions at the Interface

• Linda Badan ^[1] ; Stella Gryllia ^[2] ; Gaetano Fiorin ^[3]
  1. [1] Ghent University

     Ghent University

     Arrondissement Gent, Bélgica

     
  2. [2] Leiden University

     Leiden University

     Países Bajos

     
  3. [3] Utrecht University

     Utrecht University

     Países Bajos

     

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• Localización: Studia linguistica: A journal of general linguistics, ISSN 0039-3193, Vol. 71, Nº 3, 2017, págs. 207-240
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper investigates the prosodic, semantic and syntactic properties of fronted wh-echo questions (FWhEQs) in Italian, comparing them to information seeking wh-questions (WhQs). Results from a production experiment showed that the two differ prosodically: FWhEQs start low, rise later (the pitch accent was realized on the verb participle) and end with a high boundary tone, whereas WhQs in most of the cases start with a rise, followed by a small plateau and end with a rise or a low F0. At the syntactic level we argue that a FWhEQ moves as a whole to the specifier of a TopicP within a higher superordinate ForceP. At the semantic level, we propose that FWhEQs differ from regular WhQs in that they express a meta speech act: with a FWhEQ the speaker asks the addressee to repeat an assertion. We formalize this idea arguing that the movement of the whole ForceP to a higher ForceP, together with the obligatory final rising intonation, activates a REQUEST operator in the superordinate ForceP. The REQUEST operator is a meta speech act as it applies to another speech act, rather than to a sentence radical