Constituent question formation and focus: a new typological perspective

Abstract

All languages have strategies which enable speakers to ask constituent (‘wh’‐) questions. Of the strategies available, three types based on the notion of movement are usually cited in the literature: in situ, multiple fronting, and simple fronting. However, data reveal that focusing is the defining characteristic of constituent question formation cross‐linguistically. This paper therefore adopts a different approach, presenting a unified analysis within the non‐derivational framework of Lexical‐Functional Grammar which captures the relevant generalisations about focusing and in turn provides a fresh perspective on the typology of constituent question formation strategies.1

Prominence in Hungarian: the prosody-syntax connection

“…The question words which precede the one that has main stress bear a H monotone. This prosodic pattern is not affected by variation in the order of the question words (Mycock 2007a).…”

“…The question words which precede the one that has main stress bear a H monotone. This prosodic pattern is not affected by variation in the order of the question words (Mycock 2007a The most commonly attested pattern, as produced by Speaker F1, is shown in (37a). Similar to the pattern in (36), we see the initial question phrase melyik hallgato´'which student' realised with a H monotone, followed by the characteristic H+L accent on the immediately preverbal question word kit 'who'.…”

Nuclear prominence in ellipsis: Evidence from aggressively non-D-linked phrases

“…Hungarian is known to be prosodically dissimilar to English: the tonal organisation of an intonational phrase is entirely different in that nuclear accent is not sentence-final but sentence-initial and is not calculated on the basis of Cinque's stress deepest algorithm, but is always carried by the syntactic focus constituent, which is the wh-phrase in (53) (É. Kiss 2002, Szendrői 2003, Mycock 2007; see also Zubizarreta 1998, Kahnemuyipour 2004 on Cinque's SD not being universal). As WTH phrases are licit in sluicing constructions in Hungarian with WTHs receiving the most nuclear accent, we claim that in Hungarian, nuclear accent can align with WTHs, contrary to what we see in British English.…”