John Benjamins Publishing Company
Phonetic aspects of polar questions in Sienese
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Sara Lusini
Abstract
This study provides empirical evidence for the monoclausal status of a specific polar interrogative construction in Sienese, an Italian dialect spoken in Tuscany. At first sight, this question type looks like a biclausal discourse including two separate questions. There is however considerable syntactic evidence in favor of a monoclausal analysis. A production experiment was conducted to find out whether any correlations can be established between the underlying syntactic structure and the phonetic realization of polar questions in Sienese. The results indicate that these structures systematically correlate with distinctive prosodic properties that unambiguously establish their monoclausal status. This contribution shows how experimental approaches may be used as a powerful tool for testing syntactic hypotheses.
Abstract
This study provides empirical evidence for the monoclausal status of a specific polar interrogative construction in Sienese, an Italian dialect spoken in Tuscany. At first sight, this question type looks like a biclausal discourse including two separate questions. There is however considerable syntactic evidence in favor of a monoclausal analysis. A production experiment was conducted to find out whether any correlations can be established between the underlying syntactic structure and the phonetic realization of polar questions in Sienese. The results indicate that these structures systematically correlate with distinctive prosodic properties that unambiguously establish their monoclausal status. This contribution shows how experimental approaches may be used as a powerful tool for testing syntactic hypotheses.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents vii
- Foreword xi
- Tone and stress in North-West Indo-Aryan 1
- Whose voice is that? Challenges in forensic phonetics 14
- Pitch accent placement in Dutch as a second language 28
- The problems of adverbs in Zulu 42
- Meaningful grammar is binary, local, anti-symmetric, recursive and incomplete 60
- How prosody is both mandatory and optional 71
- No Stress Typology 83
- The effect of pause insertion on the intelligibility of Danish among Swedes 96
- Intonation, bias and Greek NPIs 109
- Information status and L2 prosody 120
- Does boundary tone production in whispered speech depend on its bearer? Exploring a case of tonal crowding in whisper 131
- The primacy of the weak in Carib prosody 144
- The effects of age and level of education on the ability of adult native speakers of Dutch to segment speech into words 152
- Doing grammatical semantics as if it were phonetics 165
- Phonetic aspects of polar questions in Sienese 174
- Etymological sub-lexicons constrain the graphematic solution space 189
- Do speakers try to distract attention from their speech errors? The prosody of self-repairs 203
- Field notes from a phonetician on Tundra Yukaghir orthography 218
- Cross-regional differences in the perception of fricative devoicing 230
- Evidence for three-level vowel length in Ageer Dinka 246
- Phonetic accounts of timed responses in syllable monitoring experiments 261
- The independent effects of prosodic structure and information status on tonal coarticulation 275
- The acoustics of English vowels in the speech of Dutch learners before and after pronunciation training 288
- The use of Chinese dialects 302
- Durational effects of phrasal stress 311
- The Laryngeal Class in RcvP and Voice phenomena in Dutch 323
- Affricates in English as a natural class 350
- Index 359
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents vii
- Foreword xi
- Tone and stress in North-West Indo-Aryan 1
- Whose voice is that? Challenges in forensic phonetics 14
- Pitch accent placement in Dutch as a second language 28
- The problems of adverbs in Zulu 42
- Meaningful grammar is binary, local, anti-symmetric, recursive and incomplete 60
- How prosody is both mandatory and optional 71
- No Stress Typology 83
- The effect of pause insertion on the intelligibility of Danish among Swedes 96
- Intonation, bias and Greek NPIs 109
- Information status and L2 prosody 120
- Does boundary tone production in whispered speech depend on its bearer? Exploring a case of tonal crowding in whisper 131
- The primacy of the weak in Carib prosody 144
- The effects of age and level of education on the ability of adult native speakers of Dutch to segment speech into words 152
- Doing grammatical semantics as if it were phonetics 165
- Phonetic aspects of polar questions in Sienese 174
- Etymological sub-lexicons constrain the graphematic solution space 189
- Do speakers try to distract attention from their speech errors? The prosody of self-repairs 203
- Field notes from a phonetician on Tundra Yukaghir orthography 218
- Cross-regional differences in the perception of fricative devoicing 230
- Evidence for three-level vowel length in Ageer Dinka 246
- Phonetic accounts of timed responses in syllable monitoring experiments 261
- The independent effects of prosodic structure and information status on tonal coarticulation 275
- The acoustics of English vowels in the speech of Dutch learners before and after pronunciation training 288
- The use of Chinese dialects 302
- Durational effects of phrasal stress 311
- The Laryngeal Class in RcvP and Voice phenomena in Dutch 323
- Affricates in English as a natural class 350
- Index 359
