The present paper investigates the issue of focus types and the ending situations in Chinese declarative and interrogative intonations. Differing only in focus of each, 5 statement sentences and 5 interrogative sentences with the same words and the same syntax in Chinese are designed for the experiment. A male Standard Chinese speaker reads them in random order three times. The results show tha...

Abstract This paper presents CINTIL-QATreebank, a treebank composed of Portuguese sentences that can be used to support the development of Question Answering systems. To create this treebank, we use declarative sentences from the pre-existing CINTIL-Treebank and manually transform their syntactic structure into a non-declarative sentence. Our corpus includes two clause types: interrogative and ...

Throughout the history of Icelandic, invariant particles, which do not inflect for semantic or syntactic features antecedent, are typical markers relative clauses (Þráinsson 2007). Another, putatively foreign strategy—relativization with interrogative–relative pronouns—is archaic in Modern but is frequent between sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a period featuring high degree literary transl...

This article explores the properties of interrogative/focus particle li in Bulgarian, in the larger context of the clitic system of that language as well as from the perspective of how li and other clitics behave in related Slavic languages. A highly derivational model of grammar is assumed, with Minimalist syntax and Distributed Morphology. As an alternative to scattered deletion, prosodically...

Attitude verbs fall in different categories depending on the kind of complements which they can embed. In English, a verb like know takes both declarative and interrogative complements. By contrast, believe takes only declarative complements and wonder takes only interrogative complements. The present paper examines the hypothesis, originally put forward by Hintikka 1975, that the only verbs th...

OF THE THESIS Alternative disjunctions in Egyptian Arabic by Lauren Danae Winans Master of Arts in Linguistics University of California, Los Angeles, 2011 Professor Jessica Rett, Chair Languages such as Chinese (Li and Thomson (1981)), Finnish (Haspelmath (2007)), Basque (Saltarelli (1988)), and Malagasy (Keenan, p.c.), among others, have been described as having two disjunctive lexical items w...

This paper addresses the problem of universal and languagespecific features in intonation perception. It reports the results of a sentence type (declarative, interrogative, exclamatory) identification task performed by Japanese and Russian subjects on re-synthesised one-word two-syllable stimuli with modified rising-falling contours. The effect of parameter manipulations on sentence type percep...

We describe a set of paraphrase patterns for questions which we derived from a corpus of questions, and report the result of using them in the automatic recognition of question paraphrases. The aim of our paraphrase patterns is to factor out different syntactic variations of interrogative words, since the interrogative part of a question adds a syntactic superstructure on the sentence part (i.e...

This paper explores two types of interrogative prosody in Yami, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. (Semi-) spontaneous data collected through the Map Task technique [1] were used and acoustic parameters such as pitch accent shapes, boundary tones, pitch range, and speech rate were examined. The results show that all parameters were used to differentiate interrogative prosody in Yami. Th...