TY - GEN
T1 - Interfacing information and prosody
T2 - French wh-in-situ questions
AU - Déprez, Viviane
AU - Syrett, Kristen
AU - Kawahara, Shigeto
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 – John Benjamins B.V.
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - French interrogatives
KW - Givenness
KW - Information structure
KW - Prosody
KW - Wh-questions
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84976390524&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1075/rllt.4.07dep
DO - 10.1075/rllt.4.07dep
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84976390524
T3 - Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory
SP - 135
EP - 153
BT - Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2010. Selected papers from �Going Romance� Leiden 2010
A2 - Franco, Irene
A2 - Lusini, Sara
A2 - Saab, Andres
PB - John Benjamins Publishing Company
ER -