When we pay close attention to the prosody of Wh-questions in Japanese, we discover many novel and interesting empirical puzzles that would require us to devise a much finer syntactic component of grammar. This paper addresses the issues that pose some problems to such an elaborated grammar, and offers solutions, making an appeal to the information structure and sentence processing involved in the interpretation of interrogative and focus constructions.

Japanese <i>wh</i>-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the <i>wh</i>-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of <i>Multiple Spell-Out</i> in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a <i>wh</i>-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and <i>wh</i>-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out.

This paper presents the results of a production experiment on the intonation of sentences containing a negative polarity item (NPI) in Tokyo Japanese. The results show that NPI sentences exhibit a focus intonation: the F₀-peak of the word to which an NPI is attached is raised, while the pitch contour after the NPI-attached word is compressed until the negation. This intonation pattern is parallel to that of wh-question, in which the F₀ of the wh-phrase is raised while the post-wh-contour is compressed until the question particle.

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La linguistique est une science et en tant que telle se doit d’avancer des explications sur les faits de langue. Notre objet est l'interrogation. Notre méthode est inspirée des sciences naturelles. Après un survol théorique, nous tentons de situer l'émergence de l'interrogation parmi un ensemble des phénomènes linguistiques et cognitifs. L'interrogation apparaît entre la deuxième et troisième année chez l'enfant. Les animaux ne possèdent pas l'interrogation, ce qui laisse penser que l’interrogation est un phénomène essentiellement humain. Les mots interrogatifs en wh- concentrent les propriétés fondamentales de l’interrogation et on en trouve d’ailleurs des équivalents dans presque toutes les langues du monde. Le logogène wh- repose sur des mécanismes neurologiques précis, que nous tentons d’identifier grâce aux apports récents des neurosciences. Nous procédons à des études de cas tirés du corpus Lara, qui est disponible dans la base de données CHILDES. Il existe une corrélation entre complexité syntaxique et questions élaborées. Nous le montrons de manière quantitative et qualitative. Nous étudions aussi les wh-words et leurs collocations pour mettre en évidence un réseau. L'interrogation a joué un rôle important dans l'évolution de notre espèce, à travers la mutation du gène myh16. L'interrogation permet l'accès à une sémantique élaborée. L'interrogation est présente à la source de la philosophie occidentale. L'interrogation est au fondement de l'interaction langagière. / Linguisticsis a science and as a such must explain the facts of language. Our method draws its inspiration from biology. After reviewing the relevant literature, we attempt to relate the emergence of interrogation to other cognitive and linguistic phenomena. Interrogation appears in child language between the ages of two and three. Interestingly, numerous studies have established that animals do not use questions, so that interrogation seems to be an intrinsically human process. Wh- question words epitomize interrogation and almost every language has them. The logogen wh- has a precise neurological base. We study the Lara Corpus extracted from the CHILDES database. There is a correlation between MLU and the complexity of questions asked by the child. We also study wh- words and their collocations to highlight the existence of a network. This network allows us to elaborate a Minimal Mind Design. Interrogation emerged after the mutation of myh16 in our species and is body-based. It provides access to elaborate semantics and has played a crucial role in Western philosophy. Interrogation is the foundation of language-based interactions.

Cette thèse a pour objectif de rendre compte des relations entre syntaxe et phonologie dans l'expression du focus pragmatique, du focus sémantique [contrastif et non-contrastif] et du donné en français francilien. S'agissant là d'un domaine assez vaste, elle se concentre particulièrement sur trois phénomènes : l'asymétrie sujet-non-sujet dans le recours aux phrases clivées en réponse aux questions partielles, l'alternance des questions à mot-wh antéposé et des questions à mot-wh in situ dans l'expression des véritables demandes d'informations et enfin les ``effets d'intervention'' dans les questions partielles. Pour chacun de ces phénomènes, elle propose une formalisation dans le cadre de la Théorie de l'Optimalité, et plus particulièrement dans l'approche Strongly Parallel OT. Elle fait notamment usage des contraintes Stress-Focus, NotGivenProminent, Destress-Given, Head-I-Right [Hi], Op-spec ou encore Epp. Elle met le français en perspective avec des langues aussi variées que l'anglais, le coréen, l'italien, le japonais, le sotho du nord et le zoulou. / This dissertation has as its objective to investigate syntax-phonology interactions in the expression of pragmatic focus, semantic focus and givenness in Francilian French, the dialect of French spoken in the Paris metropolitan area. It concentrates on three puzzles : the subject-non-subject asymmetry in the use of cleft sentences as an answering strategy to wh-questions, the occurrence of both fronted and in situ wh-questions, and so-called wh-questions' intervention effects. The phenomena investigated are accounted for through the ranking of the constraints Stress-Focus, NotGivenProminent, Destress-Given, Head-I-Right [Hi], Op-spec and Epp, within the Strongly Parallel Optimal Theoretic approach. As this thesis offers a typological perspective, languages as varied as English, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Northern Sotho and Zulu are also discussed and contrasted to French.

The aim of this dissertation is to chart the development of interrogative syntax among Finnish-speaking children between the ages of 1 to 4 years living in Sweden. The material consists of language samples taken from eleven Sweden-Finnish children with Finnish as their first language. The data from the corpus have been compared with acquisition studies of Finnish-speaking children in Finland, with material from an adult-language corpus and with studies of children speaking other languages than Finnish. The first questions appearing in the corpus are wh-questions, on average at the age of 1.9 and one month earlier than yes/no-questions. Both wh-questions and yes/no-questions are produced by all children in the corpus, whereas disjunctive questions are used by only one child. Wh-questions comprise approximately two thirds of the interrogatives and yes/no-questions a third; only one disjunctive question is used. The older the child, the greater the proportion of yes/no-questions. The earliest wh-question words are tnikä 'what' nom. sg., missä 'where' and mita 'what' part, sg., used by one-year-olds. Kuka 'who' nom. sg., mihin 'where to' and miten 'how' all appear before the age of 2.6, and miksi 'why1, mista 'where from' and minkä 'what* acc. 1 sg. start being used before the age of three. The use of milloin 'when', kenen 'whose', minkä varinen 'of what color' and mitkä 'what' nom. pl. commences at the age of three. Other question words and question word forms are produced by a few children. Wh-interrogative clauses in this study have been divided into ellipses, on-clauses, V-clauses and Adnom-clauses. The ellipses and cm-clauses are acquired on average at the age of 1.9, V-clauses at 1.11 and Adnom-clauses at 2.3. The question words are used correctly for the most part, with the same references as in adult speech. Semantic misuse of mikä 'what' was detected in 2 % of the pronoun's occurrences; kuka 'who' is misused relatively often, 38 % of the time. The different case forms of the interrogative pronouns and adjectives are on the whole used correctly. One pronoun form susceptible to misuse is nom. sg. mikä 'what', often erroneously produced instead of some other case form. The interrogative adverbs are used according to adult norms almost without exception. The earliest yes/no-questions in the corpus are -kO-questions, starting on average at age 1.10; the use of -hAn-questions begins at age 2.5. Other yes/no-questions appear at a much later date. The first -kO-questions are neutral -kO-questions. Focused -kO-questions are acquired somewhat later on. The neutral -kO-questions have been divided into onko 'Is it?'-questions, Simple V+kO-questions, Aux+kO-questions and Neg+kO+V-questions; the various types of questions are acquired in that order. The interrogative clauses in the corpus have been categorized as information-eliciting questions, directive questions, conversational questions and expressive questions; their acquisition follows ibis order. / digitalisering@umu

This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of wh-question formation in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and presents a uniform approach that can accommodate all of its various wh-constructions. JA makes use of five different wh-constructions, four of which involve clause-initial wh-phrases and the fifth is a typical in-situ wh-construction. Although wh-phrases surface clause-initially in four different wh-constructions in JA, I propose that bona fide wh-movement to [Spec, CP] does not occur in any of these constructions, whether overtly in syntax or covertly at LF. I abandon the classification of JA as a wh-movement language (Abdel Razaq 2011) and focus instead on identifying the syntactic role that wh-phrases realize and the underlying structures that feed each wh-construction. I propose that the clause-initial position of the wh-phrase results either from the syntactic function that the wh-phrase serves or from other syntactic operations that are independently attested in JA. There are three clause-initial positions that the wh-phrase can occupy: it surfaces in [Spec, TP] when functioning as the subject of a verbal or verbless structure, in [Spec, TopP] when functioning as a clitic-left-dislocated element (as in CLLD questions and ʔilli-interrogatives involving PRON), or in [Spec, FocP] when undergoing focus fronting. Thus, all instances of clause-initial wh-phrases in JA constitute what I refer to as “pseudo wh-fronting”, as the clause-initial position of the wh-phrase arises from mechanisms other than canonical wh-movement to [Spec, CP]. To account for the interpretation of wh-phrases in JA, I adopt a binding approach in which a null interrogative morpheme (Baker 1970; Pesetsky 1987; Chomsky 1995) unselectively binds the wh-phrase regardless of its surface position, whether clause-initial or clause-internal (in-situ). A major implication of this analysis is that JA is a concealed wh-in-situ language of the Chinese type although it looks at a cursory glance as though it were a wh-movement language of the English type. A broader typological implication of my analysis is the convergence of Cheng’s (1991) Clausal Typing Hypothesis to which JA previously appeared to constitute a counterexample. The recognition of the null interrogative particle, or its optional overt realization as the Q-particle huwweh, as the locus of interrogative clause typing in all JA wh-questions entails that JA employs just one unique strategy to type a clause as a wh-question, as predicted by Cheng’s Clausal Typing Hypothesis, regardless of whether the wh-phrase surfaces clause-initially or clause-internally. / February 2017