This paper proposes that the complex NP island phenomena in Chinese wh-interrogatives receive a functional-pragmatic explanation. I argue the treatments of Chinese islands in terms of movement constraints in transformational framework failed to address the interpretational distinctiveness associated with different categories of wh-words. Island facts follow naturally from an independently motiv...

The prosodic properties of distinct types of focus and wh-interrogatives are compared in Tokyo Japanese (TJ) and South Kyeongsang Korean (SKK). The results of a production study demonstrate that there are limited prosodic differences between the intonation patterns of Informational Focus (IF) and Contrastive Focus (CF) in both languages. Also, it is revealed that the intonational realization of...

Integrated interdisciplinary modeling techniques, providing reliable and accurate estimates for wave characteristics, have gained attention in recent years. With the ability to express knowledge in a rulebased form, the Rough Set Theory (RST) has been successfully employed in many fields. However the application of RST has not been investigated in wave height (WH) prediction. In this paper, the...

This study examined the processing of Japanese wh-questions with preposed (scrambled) vs. in-situ (canonical SOV word order) wh-objects, and of yes/no-questions with scrambled vs. in-situ demonstrative objects. Questions with scrambled objects elicited bilateral slow anterior negative potentials between filler and gap. Scrambled demonstratives elicited P600 effects following the filler and (L)A...

The paper provides a semantic analysis of intervention effects in wh-questions. The interpretation component of the grammar derives uninterpretability, hence ungrammaticality, of the intervention data. In the system of compositional interpretation that I suggest, wh-phrases play the same role as focused phrases, introducing alternatives into the computation. Unlike focus, wh-phrases make no ord...

This paper is a phonetic study of prosody of wh-words in whquestions, yes/no-questions and echo questions in Standard Chinese. The production data from 4 speakers show that there is a prosodic difference of wh-words and the corresponding VPs between different question types. Wh-words in whquestions are the focus of sentence, whereas in yes/noquestions, VPs are the focus. The focused constituent...