Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands

Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands

In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential ...

Scrambling of Wh-phrases in Japanese

Despite the a priori desiratum of assimilating the derivation and interpretation of wh-questions in Japanese to that in English, empirical evidence shows that overt displacement of wh-phrases in Japanese is not the same as overt wh-movement in English. The syntax of wh-phrases in Japanese is essentially the same as that of non-wh-phrases. Failure of scope reconstruction in certain cases is not ...

Wh-islands in TAG and related formalisms

1 Inherent Focus on Wh - Phrases

In the first part of the paper, I propose a framework for focus and question interpretation. While both serve to introcude alternatives, I offer reasons that the two kinds of alternatives arise on different levels of semantic interpretation. The resulting approach can correctly account for all possible constellations of focus and questions, including intervention effects, without the use of typ...

Focus Prosody in Tokyo Japanese Wh-Questions with Lexically Unaccented Wh-Phrases

This study presents new data on prosodic effects of focus in wh-questions in Tokyo Japanese, by examining prosodic effects of focus on and after lexically unaccented compound wh-words (e.g., nani.iro ‘what.color’). The results show that the realization of post-focal reduction differs considerably depending on the accentedness of the wh-word as well as of post-wh-words. When there is an accent o...