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...

This article presents a unified solution to two long-standing problems concerning successive cyclicity. First, under the minimalist program of Chomsky (1995), a trigger for successive-cyclic wh-movement to [–wh] SpecC positions must be identified. Second, as noted by den Besten & Webelhuth (1990), there is a strict prohibition against unbound intermediate traces that result from a combination o...

The di-peptide Trp-His (WH) has vasorelaxant and anti-atherosclerotic functions. We hypothesized that WH has multiple biological functions and may aid AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) activation and affect the glucose transport system in skeletal muscle. First, we examined whether WH or His-Trp (HW) can activate AMPKα. Treatment of L6 myotubes with WH or HW significantly increased phosphoryl...

The decomposition space R3/Wh associated with the Whitehead continuum Wh is not a manifold, but the product (R3/Wh) × Rm is homeomorphic to R3+m for any m ≥ 1 (known since the 1960’s). We study the quasisymmetric structure on (R3/Wh) × Rm and show that the space (R3/Wh) × Rm may be equipped with a metric resembling R3+m geometrically and measure theoretically—it is linearly locally contractible...

Based on Baunaz (2011), we distinguish among French wh-words and claim that they are three-way ambiguous: they can involve partitivity, specificity (both are presuppositional) and non-presupposition (where nonpresuppositional means not-specific/not-partitive). In addition to semantic differences, specificity and partitivity are argued to involve different prosody with wh-phrases in-situ. Buildi...

Direct questions such as “Who saw Mary?” intuitively request for a certain type of answer, for instance a noun phrase “John” or a quantified noun phrase such as “A man”. Following the structured meaning approach to questions, we propose an analysis of wh-questions in typelogical grammar that incorporates the requirement for a certain type of answer into the type assigned to wh-phrases. Interest...

Given this state of affairs, two question immediately arise: what exactly are the positions to which Wh-phrases are moving and what the driving force behind this movement is. Rudin (1988) argues that the Wh-phrase which is the first in the linear order moves to SpecCP, while others are adjoined to IP. The movement of the first Wh-phrase can be taken to be an instance of familiar Wh-movement to ...