The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions

• Viviane Déprez ^[1] ; Kristen Syrett ^[1] ; Shigeto Kawahara ^[2]
  1. [1] The State University of New Jersey
  2. [2] CNRS
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 124, 2013, págs. 4-19
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The current experiment addresses the proposal by Cheng and Rooryk (2000) that 'wh-in-situ' questions in French are marked by an obligatory rising contour, which is the result of an intonation morpheme [Q:] in C.Twelve native French speakers participated in a production study in which they produced the target interrogatives, along with a range of similar sentences. While most participants were perceived to assign 'wh-in-situ' questions a sentence-final rise, a minority was not. Moreover, the rise associated with 'wh-in-situ' was smaller than the rise exhibited in yes –no questions, which C&R claim to be licensed by the same morpheme. Given that these two results are unexpected under C&R's account, we conducted a further acoustic analysis of the productions, which revealed that for sentences lacking a sentence-final rise, the 'in situ wh'-word had an elevated high pitch accent. A statistical analysis shows a negative correlation between the height of the pitch accent assigned to the 'wh'-word and the presence and height of the sentence-final rise, indicating that instead of the sentence-final rise for 'wh-in-situ' questions being optional, it may instead be variable and predictable by focus placed on the 'wh'-word, for discourse reasons. We discuss three possibilities for the status of the intonation morpheme concerning 'yes'–no and 'wh'-questions and the role of information structure in French 'wh-in-situ' questions.