This experiment was designed to investigate whether the acoustic correlates of prosody of the pre-wh-part of the sentence differentiate in-situ-wh-questions from declaratives in Persian. To accomplish the purpose of this research 115 declaratives and 115 insitu-wh-questions were constructed. These sentences were elicited from eight Persian native speakers in a sentence elicitation task. The con...

This study set out to investigate how accent placement is pragmatically governed in WH-questions. Central to this issue are questions such as whether the intonation of the WH-word depends on the information structure of the non-WH word part, whether topical constituents can be accented, and whether constituents in the non-WH word part can be nontopical and accented. Previous approaches, based e...

In Japanese a certain kind of phrase, which Kuroda (1965) calls "indetenninate", can function as a wh-phrase, existential quantifier or universal quantifier depending on context and the use of particles. I argue that "indetenninates" are contrastive-focused, and that the meanings of existential and universal quantifiers are made of (in)finite application of disjunction ("ka") and conjunction ("...

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...

This study investigates the prosody of rhetorical questions in German. In an interaction study we examined how speakers use boundary tones, pitch, duration and voice quality to mark syntactically ambiguous questions as rhetorical or information seeking. To this end, speakers produced identical interrogatives (polar and wh questions) in rhetorical and information seeking contexts. The results sh...

The processing of Japanese wh-questions was investigated using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Unlike in English or German, a wh-element in Japanese need not be displaced from its canonical position, but instead needs a corresponding Q(uestion)-particle to indicate its interrogative scope. We tested to see if there were any processing correlates specific to these features of Japanese wh-...