The intonation and pragmatics of Greek wh-questions

We experimentally tested three hypotheses regarding the pragmatics of two tunes (one high-ending, one flat-ending) used with Greek wh-questions: (a) the high-ending tune is associated with information-seeking questions, while the flat-ending tune is also appropriate when wh-questions are not information-seeking in which case their function can instead be akin to that of a statement; (b) the high-ending tune is more polite, and (c) more appropriate for contexts leading to information-seeking questions. The wh-questions used as experimental stimuli were elicited from four speakers in contexts likely to lead to either information-seeking or non-information-seeking uses. The speakers produced distinct tunes in response to the contexts; acoustic analysis indicates these are best analysed as L*+H L-!H% (rising), and L+H* L-L% (flat). In a perception experiment where participants heard the questions out of context, they chose answers providing information significantly more frequently after high-ending than flat-ending questions, confirming hypothesis (a). In a second experiment testing hypotheses (b) and (c), participants evaluated wh-questions for appropriateness and politeness in information- and non-information-seeking contexts. High-ending questions were rated more appropriate in information-seeking contexts, and more polite independently of context relative to their flat-ending counterparts. Finally, two follow-up experiments showed that the interpretation of the two tunes was not affected by voice characteristics of individual speakers, and confirmed a participant preference for the high-ending tune. Overall, the results support our hypotheses and lead to a compositional analysis of the meaning of the two tunes, while also showing that intonational meaning is determined by both tune and pragmatic context

Projective vs. interpretational properties of nuclear accents and the phonology of contrastive focus in Greek

Nuclear accents have two interesting properties. First, they have a projective property, i.e., they may refer to a focus domain that encompasses a higher syntactic projection. Second, at least for some languages, nuclear accents may have an interpretational property, i.e., they may have alternative realizations that reveal particular interpretations, such as contrast, correction, surprise, etc. The present article examines the interaction between the projective and the interpretational properties of nuclear pitch accents. Based on an experimental study on Greek, we show that the nuclear accent that is interpreted as "contrastive" refers to a local focus domain, i.e., it is not projected to higher layers of the constituent structure. Furthermore, our experimental findings show that these properties interact with syntactic and prosodic markedness, in a way that the canonical word order and the unmarked accentual structure are felicitous in a larger array of contexts than the marked syntactic and accentual configurations. © Walter de Gruyter

Ancient Greek. Languages of the World/Materials

Ancient Greek provides us with a vivid picture of dialectal variation, which is quite unusual for the highly standardized literary languages of the antiquity. The richness of literary and non-literary sources makes it possible to give an in-depth description of diachronic and diatopic variation. Besides, peculiarities especially in the verbal system as well as in clause linkage and subordination make ancient Greek extremly interesting from a typological point of view. While the standard handbooks of Ancient Greek provide us with highly reliable descriptions, many of its typological peculiarities have hardly been brought to the attention of students of linguistic typology who are not specialized in Classics. In this grammatical sketch the author will give a description of the standard Classical language (V century BC), trying to highlight aspects of general interest; data on dialectal variation and on historically different periods will be given in the discussion. Topics discussed in the book include: (1) the socio-linguistic situation of Ancient Greece and of the Aegean area; (2) historical and dialectal classification of literary and non-literary sources; (3) phonology; (4) morphology: word formation; parts of speech system; inflectional morphology; (5) syntax of the simple sentence: word order within the sentence and the noun phrase; use of cases; verbal voice; TAM system; clitics; (6) parataxis and hypotaxis; use of the nominal forms of the verb; types of subordinate clauses; (7) late syntactic developments in the koiné (from IV century BC onwards)