‘Wh’-question intonation in Standard Colloquial Bengali

2021 ◽  
pp. 282-302
Author(s):  
Louise Mycock ◽  
Chenzi Xu ◽  
Aditi Lahiri
Keyword(s):  
Subordinate Clause ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Multiple Question ◽  
Question Intonation

Mycock, Xu, and Lahiri provide LFG analyses of multiple multi-clause constituent ‘wh’- question intonation patterns in Standard Colloquial Bengali (the Bengali dialect spoken in Kolkata), capturing the intonational tune–text mapping which crucially interacts with syntax, pragmatics, and semantics. Based on a new set of data, they identify the intonational contours used with ‘wh’-questions that include multiple question words and/or that comprise multiple clauses. These data reveal that a Focus accent can be ‘shared’ across a sequence of question words and that a subordinate clause forms a separate intonational unit (an Intonational Phrase) when it contains question words that take scope over a higher clause but not when they only take scope over the clause in which they appear.

The intonation of wh-questions in Franco-Ontarian

1973 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Renée Baligand ◽  
Eric James
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Frequency ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Important Research ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Interrogative Sentence ◽  
Question Intonation

The melodic structure of an interrogative utterance frequently depends on the grammatical structure of the sentence in question. In addition to the enunciative sentence of the kind vous venez? which bears a particular acoustic mark of interrogation, a rise in fundamental frequency in sentence-final position, there exist also interrogative utterances signalled by inversion of word order and still others marked by lexical means, the WH-questions. It is the intonation of this latter type of sentence which we intend to examine in the Canadian-French spoken in Ontario.The intonation of interrogative sentences has for some years been the object of important research in different languages. Wells (1945) and Trager and Smith (1951) note in English an intonation curve at the following levels: 2 - 3 - 1 - without any tonal prominence on the interrogative word. Armstrong and Ward (1926), Jones (1932) and Faure (1948) also find that this type of interrogative sentence has a descending intonation. Fries (1964) finds no specific intonation pattern in a spontaneous corpus from which he studied yes-no questions. For German, Von Essen (1956) notes two intonation patterns: one rising (question intonation) and one falling (interrogative intonation).

Responses of Language-Disordered Children to Wh-Questions

1986 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha M. Parnell ◽  
James D. Amerman ◽  
Roger D. Harting
Keyword(s):  
Relative Difficulty ◽  
Normal Children ◽  
Cognitive Linguistic ◽  
Wh Questions

Nineteen language-disordered children aged 3—7 years responded to items representing nine wh-question forms. Questions referred to three types of referential sources based on immediacy and visual availability. Three and 4-year-olds produced significantly fewer functionally appropriate and functionally accurate answers than did the 5- and 6-year-olds. Generally, questions asked with reference to nonobservable persons, actions, or objects appeared the most difficult. Why, when, and what happened questions were the most difficult of the nine wh-forms. In comparison with previous data from normal children, the language-disordered subjects' responses were significantly less appropriate and accurate. The language-disordered children also appeared particularly vulnerable to the increased cognitive/linguistic demands of questioning directed toward nonimmediate referents. A hierarchy of wh-question forms by relative difficulty was very similar to that observed for normal children. Implications for wh-question assessment and intervention are discussed.

Similarities in the Syntactic Structure of the German and Croatian Language

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 107-118
Author(s):  
Manuela Svoboda
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Subordinate Clause ◽  
German Language ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Subordinate Clauses

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to analyse any potential similarities between the Croatian and German language and present them adopting a contrastive approach with the intent of simplifying the learning process in regards to the German syntactic structure for Croatian German as foreign language students. While consulting articles and books on the theories and methods of foreign language teaching, attention is usually drawn to differences between the mother tongue and the foreign language, especially concerning false friends etc. The same applies to textbooks, workbooks and how teachers behave in class. Thus, it is common practice to deal with the differences between the foreign language and the mother tongue but less with similarities. This is unfortunate considering that this would likely aid in acquiring certain grammatical and syntactic structures of the foreign language. In the author's opinion, similarities are as, if not more, important than differences. Therefore, in this article the existence of similarities between the Croatian and German language will be examined closer with a main focus on the segment of sentence types. Special attention is drawn to subordinate clauses as they play an important role when speaking and/or translating sentences from Croatian to German and vice versa. In order to present and further clarify this matter, subordinate clauses in both the German and Croatian language are defined, clarified and listed to gain an oversight and to present possible similarities between the two. In addition, the method to identify subordinate clauses in a sentence is explained as well as what they express, which conjunctions are being used for each type of subordinate clause in both languages and where the similarities and/or differences between the two languages lie.

Intonation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura J. Downing ◽  
Al Mtenje
Keyword(s):  
African Languages ◽  
Tone Languages ◽  
Questions And Answers ◽  
Question Intonation

Intonation in African languages remains an especially understudied topic of investigation. Chichewa is, then, rather exceptional, as there exist both purely impressionistic studies of intonation for the language, such as Kanerva (1990), as well as more phonetically informed studies, such as Carleton (1996), Myers (1996, 1999a, b), Downing (2011a, 2017), and Downing et al. (2004). Based on this work as well as our own investigations, the first three sections of the chapter provide an overview of intonation in three basic constructions: declarative sentences (both simple and complex), content questions and answers, and polar questions. Emphasis prosody (as opposed to focus prosody) is also discussed. Intonational phenomena covered include: downstep, final lowering, continuation rise, emphasis raising, suspension of downstep, and polar question intonation. The implications of Chichewa intonation for the typology of intonation in tone languages is discussed in the concluding section of the chapter.

Should we regard question-based media headlines as clickbait?

English Today ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Brian Poole
Keyword(s):  
Question Mark ◽  
Link Type ◽  
Wh Questions

In an article published a little over a decade ago (Betteridge, 2009), the journalist Ian Betteridge offered some scathing comments about a piece published a few days earlier in TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld (Schonfeld, 2009). Amongst other things, Betteridge suggested that the headline concerned (‘Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?’) was ‘a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no”.’ Readers of English Today will realise immediately that this ‘maxim’ cannot possibly be watertight as expressed by Betteridge, since only polar questions can be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For example, WH-questions (Quirk & Greenbaum, 1973: 196) such as ‘Who opened my letter?’ and ‘How long have you been waiting?’ obviously cannot be responded to in any sensible way with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Furthermore, it is not difficult to find media headlines taking the form of non-polar questions: for example, “What would a no-deal Brexit mean for business?” (O'Dwyer et.al., 2020).

scholarly journals Reanalysis processes in non-native sentence comprehension

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Hiroki Fujita ◽  
Ian Cunnings
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movement ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Memory Trace ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Subordinate Clause

Abstract We report two offline and two eye-movement experiments examining non-native (L2) sentence processing during and after reanalysis of temporarily ambiguous sentences like “While Mary dressed the baby laughed happily”. Such sentences cause reanalysis at the main clause verb (“laughed”), as the temporarily ambiguous noun phrase (“the baby”) may initially be misanalysed as the direct object of the subordinate clause verb (“dressed”). The offline experiments revealed that L2ers have difficulty reanalysing temporarily ambiguous sentences with a greater persistence of the initially assigned misinterpretation than native (L1) speakers. In the eye-movement experiments, we found that L2ers complete reanalysis similarly to L1ers but fail to fully erase the memory trace of the initially assigned interpretation. Our results suggested that the source of L2 reanalysis difficulty is a failure to erase the initially assigned misinterpretation from memory rather than a failure to conduct syntactic reanalysis.

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