The Intonation and Pragmatics of Greek wh-Questions

Greek wh-questions and the phonology of intonation

The intonation of Greek wh-questions consists of a rise-fall followed by a low plateau and a final rise. With acoustic data, we show (1) that the exact contour shape depends on the length of the question, and (2) that the position of the first peak and the low plateau depends on the position of the stressed syllables, and shows predictable adjustments in alignment depending on the proximity of ...

The intonation of echo wh-questions

The acoustic characteristics of German echo questions are explored in a production study. It is shown that there are prosodic differences (F0, duration, intensity) between echo questions signalling a high level of emotional arousal, echo questions signalling that the speaker did not understand the previous utterance, and questions requesting completely new information. The findings are largely ...

Focus in Greek wh-questions

We present an analysis of multiple focus sentences in Greek. On an empirical level, we show that the current generalisation in the Greek literature that multiple focus is unavailable in Greek is too strong as it stands. What is unavailable is multiple maximal foci in sentences where one focused item has moved to the left periphery. We view the unavailability of multiple foci in such sentences a...

The Pragmatics of WH-Question Intonation in English

Interface between information structure and intonation in Dutch WH-questions

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...