Wh Exclamatives Imperatives And Wh Questions

Research on left periphery phenomena has increased in the last 20 years, resulting in consistent studies from a wide range of languages and a fruitful debate on the functional projections within the CP system. Throughout these years, important contributions have been made on Brazilian Portuguese, especially on wh-interrogative sentences, focalization, topicalization and relative clauses. As for exclamative and imperative sentences, however, there is a considerable research gap in all grammatical levels. Regarding interrogatives, semantic and prosodic studies are still lacking (as well as research on the acquisition and processing of these constructions). This collected volume fills some of those gaps, gathering studies on wh-exclamatives, imperatives and wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese which approach syntactical, semantical and prosodic aspects of these constructions through a rich and unregistered set of data. They also deliver novel acquisition and diachronic data that will further both the comprehension of Brazilian Portuguese grammar and the ongoing discussions on left periphery phenomena.

Research on left periphery phenomena has increased in the last 20 years, resulting in consistent studies from a wide range of languages and a fruitful debate on the functional projections within the CP system. Throughout these years, important contributions have been made on Brazilian Portuguese, especially on wh-interrogative sentences, focalization, topicalization and relative clauses. As for exclamative and imperative sentences, however, there is a considerable research gap in all grammatical levels. Regarding interrogatives, semantic and prosodic studies are still lacking (as well as research on the acquisition and processing of these constructions). This collected volume fills some of those gaps, gathering studies on wh-exclamatives, imperatives and wh-questions in Brazilian Portuguese which approach syntactical, semantical and prosodic aspects of these constructions through a rich and unregistered set of data. They also deliver novel acquisition and diachronic data that will further both the comprehension of Brazilian Portuguese grammar and the ongoing discussions on left periphery phenomena.

An innovative survey that covers the linguistic questions of modality and mood, offering a new model for the phenomenon.

This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the prosody of Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish using the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription system. The chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language as well as on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages. This book will pave the way for more systematic typological comparisons of prosody across both Romance and non-Romance languages.

Within a new model of language acquisition, this book discusses verb second (V2) word order in situations where there is variation in the input. While traditional generative accounts consider V2 to be a parameter, this study shows that, in many languages, this word order is dependent on fine distinctions in syntax and information structure. Thus, within a split-CP model of clause structure, a number of "micro-cues" are formulated, taking into account the specific context for V2 vs. non-V2 (clause type, subcategory of the elements involved, etc.). The micro-cues are produced in children s I-language grammars on exposure to the relevant input. Focusing on a dialect of Norwegian, the book shows that children generally produce target-consistent V2 and non-V2 from early on, indicating that they are sensitive to the micro-cues. This includes contexts where word order is dependent on information structure. The children s occasional non-target-consistent behavior is accounted for by economy principles."

The Right Periphery in L2 Chinese is among the first books to try to incorporate both advanced linguistic and acquisition perspectives to show how eight sentence-final particles are represented in English-speaking learners’ L2 Chinese. This book will inform researchers of the general construction of the right periphery in L2 grammars. Drawing on up-to-date theoretical frameworks and findings from advanced empirical studies, it sketches the general picture of the periphery that these particles occupy in English-Chinese interlanguages. Readers will grasp the problems and difficulties, and particularly the ambiguities, which learners of Chinese must grapple with in the process of acquiring sentence-final particles. Possible influential factors underlying the acquisition process are explicitly discussed as well. Researchers will also find insights in the advanced methodologies and statistics that are used to study Chinese. The book will be illuminating for researchers interested in SLA, linguists of generative theories, and educators teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language.

Although the field of polarity is well researched, this monograph offers a new take on polarity sensitivity that both challenges and incorporates previous theories. Based primarily on Swedish data, it presents new solutions to long-standing problems, such as the non-complementary distribution of NPIs and PPIs in yes/no-questions and conditionals, long distance licensing by superordinate elements, and the occurrence of polarity items in wh-questions. It is argued that polarity sensitivity can be understood in terms of evaluability. Lacking any immediate predecessor in the literature, evaluability refers to the possibility of accepting or rejecting an utterance as true in a communicative exchange. Intriguingly, the evaluable status of a clause is shown to have syntactic correlates in Swedish, mirrored in the configuration of the C-domain. This book is of interest to scholars studying the interplay between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, particularly those working on negation and polarity.

Bringing together the research fields of sign language linguistics and information structure, this bookfocuses onthe realization of modal particles and focus particles in three European sign languages: German Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands, and Irish Sign Language. As a cross-linguistic investigation based on a systematic methodological approach, thestudy analyzes the results particularly with regard to nonmanual features expressed by articulators such as the body, head, and face. The analyses of the data provide interesting insights into the syntax-prosody interface in sign languages and the interaction of syntax and prosody in general. Modal and focus particles have not been thoroughly investigated in sign languages. This volumepresents the first studyon this phenomenonand is thus an innovative contribution to the field. From a methodological and theoretical perspective, it draws onup-to-date linguistic tools and provides professionally elicited and annotated data. The bookaccounts for theresultswithin existing theoretical models. Given its specific focus on nonmanuals, the book contributes to recent debates on information structure and the syntax-prosody interface and will be of special interest to both sign and spoken language linguists.