Chapter 9
On the role of prosody in wh-in-situ
Cross-linguistic comparison and experimental evidence from
Basque
A growing number of works propose a direct role
of PF in the generation of wh-in-situ. Relying
mainly on data from Basque, we critically evaluate two such
proposals (Richards,
2010; Mathieu,
2016) and argue that they face a range of empirical and
conceptual shortcomings. We contrast these with the more
“syntactocentric” proposal of Cheng & Rooryck (2000) for French, based on an
intonational Q-morpheme that surfaces as a final rise in polar and
wh-in-situ questions. We report the outcome of
a production experiment providing evidence that the final rises of
polar and wh-in-situ questions in Navarro-Labourdin
Basque do not differ substantially, thus suggesting that Cheng & Rooryck’s
(2000) proposal may be extended to this variety
cohabiting with French.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Basque interrogative strategies: The emergence of wh-in-situ
- 2.1Interrogatives in Basque
- 2.2The new wh-in-situ strategy of
Navarro-Labourdin Basque
- 3.Interface approaches to wh-in-situ
- 3.1
Cheng & Rooryck
(2000)
: An intonation morpheme licensing wh-in-situ and yes/no questions
- 3.2Richards (2010,
2016)
- 3.3
Mathieu (2016)
- 4.Problems with prosody-based analyses
- 4.1Stress patterns and interrogative strategies
- 4.2Prosodic phrasing and interrogative strategies
- 5.Assessing the prosodic patterns of interrogatives in
Basque: An experiment
- 5.1Extending Cheng &
Rooryck’s (2000) analysis to Basque
- 5.2The experiment
- 5.2.1The questionnaire
- 5.2.2Measurements
- 5.2.3Results
- 5.3Discussion
- 6.Conclusions
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
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