Appeals to prosody in Japanese Wh-interrogatives鈥擲peakers鈥?versus listeners鈥?strategies

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• 作者：Yoshihisa Kitagawa^a ; ^{kitagawa@indiana.edu} ; Yuki Hirose^b ; ^{hirose@boz.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp}
• 关键词：Focus prosody (FPd) ; Prosody&ndash ; scope correlation ; Speaker&ndash ; listener asymmetry ; Subjacency ; Wh-in-situ ; Wh-(COMP) dependency ; Wh-scope ambiguity
• 刊名：Lingua
• 出版年：2012
• 期刊代码：88_00243841
• 类别：soc
• 出版时间：May, 2012
• 卷：122
• 期：6
• 页码：608-641
• 文件大小：1962 K

摘要

The present study examines how Wh-interrogative sentences in Japanese are produced and comprehended when they involve potentially ambiguous Wh-scope interpretations. Two experiments were conducted: one eliciting utterances from native speakers and the other testing the comprehension of resynthesized sound stimuli. The results reveal the existence of a puzzling asymmetry between production and comprehension as well as an asymmetry between matrix and subordinate Wh-scope comprehension. Speakers mainly make use of the pitch of the item immediately following the subordinate complementizer to encode distinct Wh-scope interpretations. Listeners, on the other hand, rely more heavily on the pitch of a subordinate-clause Wh-item to decode its scope interpretation, especially when the matrix Wh-scope interpretation is detected. Potential sources of the speaker-listener discrepancy are identified, and it is argued that this discrepancy contributes to the difficulty of the matrix scope interpretation of an 鈥渋n-situ鈥?Wh-phrase located within an embedded Wh-clause.