Wh-questions in Tamil are not distinguished from declarative utterances by either pitch accent type or boundary tone. Acoustic analysis of data from 18 speakers comparing whquestions with corresponding declaratives revealed that the lexical marking of interrogativity is nevertheless accompanied by differences in intonation. The most consistent result was raising of f0 peaks in question words an...

i Acknowledgements I still cannot believe that it's been two years since I moved to Toronto, and that I have finished my forum paper. I have never written a paper of this size, even in Japanese, in my life. I have learned so many things in the last year through this work. The most valuable thing that I learned is the importance of my friends and my teachers. Without them, I would not have been ...

Previous studies on the intonation of wh-in-situ questions in French have focused mainly on the utterance final movement and ignored the prosodic properties of the region preceding the wh-constituent. Yet, these latter properties are particularly interesting from a processing perspective, as they may help the listener anticipate a question before the wh-word is reached, which might facilitate p...

In Yaeyaman, a critically endangered Japonic language of the Southern Ryukyus, there is a distinction made between singular and plural wh-questions, with plurality indicated by reduplication of the indeterminate (wh) pronoun. I argue that reduplication of the indeterminate is triggered by a morpheme RED that requires the presence of non-atoms in the set of Hamblin alternatives denoted by its si...

This paper addresses two central issues related to the problem of auxiliary inversion in English wh-questions: 1) there are multiple proposals of the source of the error but none can explain the data in full; 2) the data on children’s wh-questions are inconsistent, due to differences in methods and techniques. We propose that language-specific structural characteristics of the target grammar (e...

Unlike comprehension of declarative sentences, comprehension of wh-questions in agrammatic aphasia is a neglected research topic. Not all whquestions are understood equally well yet the nature of this difficulty has received sparse attention in the literature. According to one view (Avrutin 2000), which follows Pesetsky's (1987) well-known distinction of whquestions, questions beginning with wh...

This paper proposes a structural analysis of two types of wh-question formation in the Austronesian languages Seediq and Tagalog. Wh-questions formed on arguments are pseudo-cleft constructions; the wh-word functions as a predicate taking the rest of the clause, in the form of a headless relative, as its subject. The restriction that argument wh-questions can only be formed on absolutives is ac...

This study attempted to replicate the unusual wh question comprehension pattern of Hickok and Avrutin's (1996) subjects who showed an expected subject/object extraction asymmetry for which NP questions, but not for who questions. We also examined comprehension of what and which one questions, which are similar to who and which NP questions, respectively, and we examined passivized wh questions ...

This paper reports a series of formal acceptability-judgment experiments designed to investigate the syntactic properties of a relatively understudied type of wh-dependency: multiple wh-questions in English. By using a factorial definition of island effects made available only by formal experiments, we report an unpredicted pattern of acceptability that suggests the existence of reverse island ...