to be able to reach the level of ultimate attainment in the second language, learners need to acquire not only the grammar of the l2 but also the language processing mechanisms involved in the comprehension of sentences in real time. contrary to its importance, very little is known yet about online l2 processing. this study examines whether advanced iranian learners of english reactivate disloc...

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 ...

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...