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Article Dans Une Revue Lingua Année : 2013

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

Résumé

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. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Dates et versions

hal-01103338 , version 1 (14-01-2015)

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Viviane Deprez, Kristen Syrett, Shigeto Kawahara. The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions . Lingua, 2013, 124, Special Issue : SI Pages : 4-19. ⟨10.1016/j.lingua.2012.03.002⟩. ⟨hal-01103338⟩
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