Interfacing information and prosody

Abstract

We present experimental evidence bearing on Cheng & Rooryk's (2000) proposal that wh-in-situ questions in French are licensed by an intonational morpheme that is also present in yes-no questions. Their core claim is that such questions are ungrammatical without a rising contour. While most speakers in our experiment assigned these sentences a rising contour, not all did--and when they did, the slope of the rise was not as steep as in yes no questions. Our findings support C&R's proposal, as long as we allow information structure to play a central role. We therefore support a view of question formation in French in which information structure, syntax, and prosody form a tight relationship: the shape of the intonational contour that is predicted to occur syntactically is affected by pragmatic information. We present a theoretical account appealing to movement through givenness marking that accounts for pitch compression observed in French wh-in-situ questions