Chapter published in:
Syntactic Geolectal Variation: Traditional approaches, current challenges and new tools
Edited by Alba Cerrudo, Ángel J. Gallego and Francesc Roca Urgell
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 34] 2021
► pp. 263–294

Chapter 9
On the role of prosody in wh-in-situ

Cross-linguistic comparison and experimental evidence from Basque

| CNRS-IKER
| CNRS-IKER
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.
Keywords: wh-in-situ, wh-movement, prosody, variation, Basque
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
  • References
Published online: 26 November 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.34.09dug
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