Interfacing information and prosody

Viviane Deprez (1) , Kristen Syrett (2) , Shigeto Kawahara (3)

1 L2C2 - Laboratoire sur le langage, le cerveau et la cognition
2 RuCCS - Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive ScienceRutgers University.
3 ICLS - The Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies

We present experimental evidence bearing on Cheng & Rooryk's (2000) proposal that wh-in-situ questions in French are licensed by an intonational morpheme that is also present in yes-no questions. Their core claim is that such questions are ungrammatical without a rising contour. While most speakers in our experiment assigned these sentences a rising contour, not all did--and when they did, the slope of the rise was not as steep as in yes no questions. Our findings support C&R's proposal, as long as we allow information structure to play a central role. We therefore support a view of question formation in French in which information structure, syntax, and prosody form a tight relationship: the shape of the intonational contour that is predicted to occur syntactically is affected by pragmatic information. We present a theoretical account appealing to movement through givenness marking that accounts for pitch compression observed in French wh-in-situ questions.

Domaines: Linguistique

Viviane Deprez, Kristen Syrett, Shigeto Kawahara. Interfacing information and prosody. Irene Franco, Sara Lusini & Andrés Saab. Romance languages and Linguistic Theory, John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp.135-154, 2010. ⟨hal-00927013⟩