Chapter 3
Focus fronting vs. wh-movement
Evidence from Sardinian
It is commonly held that focus fronting exhibits similar properties to wh-movement. The syntactic parallelism between the two types of movement has been supported by the semantic analyses of wh-questions that assume that when wh-words function as interrogative operators, they are inherently focal. The main goal of this paper is to challenge this highly attractive picture of the relationship between wh-words, focus, and movement, and to claim that wh-phrases are not inherently focal. The results of a prosodic production experiment on the distribution of the nuclear pitch accent in Sardinian wh-questions, together with the syntactic properties related to the asymmetry between direct and indirect wh-questions, form the empirical basis of this study.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.FF vs. wh-movement in Sardinian
- 3.The distribution of the ‘nuclear pitch accent’ in wh-questions
- 3.1The prosodic patterns of wh-questions
- 3.2The NPA in Sardinian wh-questions
- 4.Sardinian wh-questions: The prosodic experiment
- 4.1The experimental material and procedure
- 4.2Results
- 5.The asymmetry between direct and indirect wh-questions
- 6.Analysis: Interrogative wh-words are not inherently focal
- 7.Conclusions
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
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References