scholarly journals Echo questions in Brazilian Portuguese

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary A. Kato
Keyword(s):  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Declarative Sentence ◽  
Focus Position ◽  
Echo Questions

ABSTRACT Brazilian Portuguese (BP) can have the wh-element in-situ with two types of sentence intonation: (a) the rising intonation of a yes/no question, in which case it is interpreted as an echo question, and (b) the falling intonation, similar to that of a declarative sentence, in which case it is interpreted as an ordinary question. Kato (2013) analyzed the falling intonation type as a fake wh-in-situ, with a short movement of the wh-element to a lower focus position, inspired by Miyagawa’s (2001) proposal for Japanese whereas the rising intonation type was analyzed in accordance with Kayne’s (1994) proposal, with the whole TP containing the wh-element moving to Spec of C. In this article we maintain the analysis of the wh-in-situ with falling intonation as a fake in-situ but analyze the echo question as a short yes/no indirect question. The languages used to support this analysis of BP are English, French, and Japanese.

scholarly journals The Role of the Auditory and Visual Modalities in the Perceptual Identification of Brazilian Portuguese Statements and Echo Questions

2020 ◽  
pp. 002383091989888
Author(s):  
Luma Miranda ◽  
Marc Swerts ◽  
João Moraes ◽  
Albert Rilliard
Keyword(s):  
Visual Information ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Perceptual Identification ◽  
Auditory Information ◽  
Visual Channel ◽  
Prosodic Cues ◽  
The Face ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Echo Questions

This paper presents the results of three perceptual experiments investigating the role of auditory and visual channels for the identification of statements and echo questions in Brazilian Portuguese. Ten Brazilian speakers (five male) were video-recorded (frontal view of the face) while they produced a sentence (“ Como você sabe”), either as a statement (meaning “ As you know.”) or as an echo question (meaning “ As you know?”). Experiments were set up including the two different intonation contours. Stimuli were presented in conditions with clear and degraded audio as well as congruent and incongruent information from both channels. Results show that Brazilian listeners were able to distinguish statements and questions prosodically and visually, with auditory cues being dominant over visual ones. In noisy conditions, the visual channel improved the interpretation of prosodic cues robustly, while it degraded them in conditions where the visual information was incongruent with the auditory information. This study shows that auditory and visual information are integrated during speech perception, also when applied to prosodic patterns.

Echo Questions in the Minimalist Program

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Sobin
Keyword(s):  
Minimalist Program ◽  
Wide Scope ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Question Formation ◽  
Scope Assignment ◽  
Echo Questions

English echo questions present numerous challenges to the analysis of interrogatives, including (a) simple wh-in-situ (You saw who?); (b) apparent Superiority violations (What did who see?); (c) apparent verb movement without wh-movement (Has Mary seen what?); and (d) requisite wide scope only for echo-question-introduced wh-phrases (underlined in these examples—only who in What did who see? is being asked about). Such apparently contrary features may be explained in terms of independently necessary scope assignment mechanisms and a complementizer that subordinates the utterance being echoed and “freezes” its CP structure. No norms of question formation are violated.

On Wh-questions in Persian

2001 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arsalan Kahnemuyipour
Keyword(s):  
Focus Position ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Focus Movement

AbstractThis article explores wh-questions in Persian and examines how the “clausal typing hypothesis” and the “focus-fronting analysis” fare with respect to Persian wh-questions. It is shown that Persian wh-questions involve obligatory movement of wh-phrases to a preverbal focus position. This movement is different from syntactic wh-movement in that it does not involve movement of the wh-phrase to [Spec, CP], whose trigger is a [+wh] feature in C. Thus, in terms of the typology of wh-questions, Persian is neither a syntactic wh-movement nor a wh-in-situ language; rather, it should be classified with languages such as Aghem, Basque, Hungarian, Kirundi, and Serbo-Croatian, in which wh-phrases have been argued to undergo focus movement. It is shown that Persian does not seem to share the properties of Serbo-Croatian, another focus-fronting language. Some possible explanations are provided and the theoretical implications are discussed.

scholarly journals Actual and apparent change in Brazilian Portuguese wh-interrogatives

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-191
Author(s):  
Malte Rosemeyer
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Functional Change ◽  
Ex Situ ◽  
Frequency Increase ◽  
Usage Frequency ◽  
Replacement Process ◽  
Actual Change ◽  
Frequency Changes

ABSTRACTPrevious studies on the diachrony of wh-interrogation in Brazilian Portuguese have observed a replacement process of ex-situ-wh interrogatives by cleft-wh and in-situ-wh interrogatives in the twentieth century. The present study analyzes almost 19,000 wh-interrogatives from a corpus of theater plays dated between 1800 and 2016, demonstrating that not all of these frequency changes constitute actual change. The increase in the usage frequency of several types of wh-interrogatives is partially or entirely due to changes in the degree of orality of theater plays, or changes in word order. Moreover, only some of these changes can be characterized as changes from below, that is, changes in which high-orality texts are affected by the frequency increase first. This notion is also relevant for functional change in wh-interrogatives. Over time, the use of cleft-wh and in-situ-wh interrogatives spread from contexts in which the proposition is highly accessible to low-accessibility contexts. For cleft-wh, this change is moderated by orality, again indicating change from below.

scholarly journals The prosody of French wh-in-situ questions: Echo vs. non-echo

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
ALIZA GLASBERGEN-PLAS ◽  
STELLA GRYLLIA ◽  
JENNY DOETJES
Keyword(s):  
Information Seeking ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Question Type ◽  
The Other ◽  
Focus Structure ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
The One ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Echo Questions

This study compares the prosodic properties of French wh-in-situ echo questions and string-identical information seeking questions in relation to focus. Thirty-six (12 $\times$ 3) wh-in-situ questions were embedded in dialogues designed to elicit (A) echo questions expressing auditory failure, (B) information seeking questions with broad focus or (C) information seeking questions with narrow focus on the wh-phrase, i.e. a focus structure similar to the one of echo questions. Analyses regarding the F0, duration and intensity of the utterances produced by 20 native speakers of French show clear prosodic differences between the three conditions. Our results indicate that part of the prosodic properties of echo questions can be attributed to the presence of narrow focus (A and C vs. B) while another part is truly characteristic of echo questions themselves (A vs. B and C). In combination with known differences regarding their pragmatics, semantics and syntax, this sets echo questions apart as a separate question type. At the same time, our results offer evidence for prosodic encoding of focus in French wh-in-situ questions, confirming and adding to existing claims regarding the prosody of focus marking in French on the one hand and the presence of focus marking in wh-interrogatives on the other.

scholarly journals Covert movement in English probing wh-questions

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 180
Author(s):  
An Duy Nguyen ◽  
Géraldine Legendre
Keyword(s):  
Surface Structure ◽  
Information Seeking ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Covert Movement ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Acceptability Judgment ◽  
Syntactic Difference ◽  
Probing Questions ◽  
Echo Questions

Besides fronted information-seeking questions, English also allows for two types of wh-in-situ ones: echo questions, which are used to request a repetition or a clarification of a previous utterance, and probing questions, which are often used in quiz shows, classroom settings, and child-directed speech to “prompt” the addressee for an answer. An acceptability judgment task shows that PQs with multiple wh-phrases get a significantly lower acceptability score than echo questions with multiple wh-phrases despite their similarity in surface structure, which suggests a syntactic difference below the surface. Independent syntactic evidence confirms the result and further suggests that while echo questions involve no syntactic movement (Dayal, 1996), probing questions involve covert wh-movement.

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