Interaction of prosody and syntax-semantics in Mandarin wh-indeterminates

The Deterministic Prosody of Indeterminates

Korean has so-called indeterminate words (cf. Kuroda 1965) that can be used as either interrogatives or indefinites depending on the context. For instance, the indeterminate word nwukwu is ambiguous between an interrogative reading ‘who’ and an indefinite reading ‘someone’. Thus the sentence in (1) has three different interpretations: i) an assertion with an indefinite, ii) a yes-no question wi...

Syntax and Semantics of Complex and Ambiguous Wh-questions

In this paper, we present a new approach to the syntax and semantics of wh-questions. On the basis of an appropriate type hierarchy whose members model contributions of lexical items to sentence mood, we introduce a head-interrogative schema that licences wh-sentences syntactically and contributes the semantic interrogative operator. This syntactic basis allows the compositional construction of...

The interplay and interaction between prosody and syntax: evidence from Mandarin Chinese

This paper aims to (1.) quantify possible correlation between syntactic structure and prosodic manifestation in Mandarin Chinese, (2.) explore to what extent such correlation could be predicted by syntactic structures and what may go beyond these correlations, and (3.) increase more operational characteristics to Mandarin prosodic structures.

Linking Semantics and Syntax in Mandarin Serial Verbs

Prosody in a corpus of French spontaneous speech: perception, annotation and prosody ~ syntax interaction

Our study focuses on the issue of prosodic annotation and of the prosody ~ syntax interface in conversation and is based on a large corpus of conversational speech in French. The results of inter-transcriber agreement tests show that two expert transcribers are consistent in their labeling of prosodic phrasing and the consistency is well above the chance. A qualitative analysis reveals transcri...