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Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2018: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 32, Utrecht
Edited by Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen and Luisa Meroni
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 357] 2021
► pp. 49–70

Chapter 3
Focus fronting vs. wh-movement

Evidence from Sardinian

| University of Helsinki

It is commonly held that focus fronting exhibits similar properties to wh-movement. The syntactic parallelism between the two types of movement has been supported by the semantic analyses of wh-questions that assume that when wh-words function as interrogative operators, they are inherently focal. The main goal of this paper is to challenge this highly attractive picture of the relationship between wh-words, focus, and movement, and to claim that wh-phrases are not inherently focal. The results of a prosodic production experiment on the distribution of the nuclear pitch accent in Sardinian wh-questions, together with the syntactic properties related to the asymmetry between direct and indirect wh-questions, form the empirical basis of this study.

Keywords: focus fronting, wh-question, nuclear pitch accent, Sardinian, production experiment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.FF vs. wh-movement in Sardinian
  • 3.The distribution of the ‘nuclear pitch accent’ in wh-questions
    • 3.1The prosodic patterns of wh-questions
    • 3.2The NPA in Sardinian wh-questions
  • 4.Sardinian wh-questions: The prosodic experiment
    • 4.1The experimental material and procedure
    • 4.2Results
  • 5.The asymmetry between direct and indirect wh-questions
  • 6.Analysis: Interrogative wh-words are not inherently focal
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.357.03cru
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