Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T08:17:18.290Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The intonation of the Q-marking construction: A comparison of Hungarian and Slovenian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2019

LOUISE MYCOCK
LOUISE MYCOCK*
Affiliation:
Somerville College, University of Oxford
*
Author’s address: Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford, Somerville College, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HD, UK[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper examines the Q-marking construction: an interrogative construction in which a question phrase takes scope over a higher clause even though it appears in a lower clause. In this construction, the scope of a question phrase is extended by the presence of another word, the Q-marker, in a higher clause. While the syntax of this construction has been described and analysed in a number of works, its intonation is yet to receive commensurate attention. This paper presents data from two unrelated languages in which the Q-marking construction can be used to form questions: Hungarian and Slovenian. Data show that while the Q-marker shares properties with question words in Hungarian (they bear the same pitch accent), in Slovenian the Q-marker and question words bear distinct pitch accents. Furthermore, in Hungarian a direct intonational link exists between the Q-marker and a question phrase whose scope is extended, rather than an indirect one between the Q-marker and the entire lower clause in which the question phrase appears. The Slovenian data are compatible with the existence of either an indirect or a direct intonational link. These findings reveal hitherto unidentified dimensions of cross-linguistic variation, for which any analysis of the Q-marking construction must account.

Keywords

Hungarianintonationlong-distance dependencySlovenian‘wh’-scope marking
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , 01 April 2020 , pp. 359 - 397
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Rick Gartner, Mária Gósy, Tekla Etelka Gráczi, Darja Hoenigman, Kerstin Hoge, Viktória Horváth, Matjaž Justin, Aditi Lahiri, Albina Nećak Lük, Alexandra Markó, Maruška Markovčič, Attila Mártonfi, Lenka Meszler, Helena Seražin, Rastislav Šuštaršič, Tamás Péter Szabó, Nigel Vincent, Damjana Žbontar, and Maja Zupančič Justin for their time and assistance, and three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for their invaluable insights. This work was supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Postdoctoral Studies Research Scholarship awarded by the Hungarian Scholarship Board (Magyar Ösztöndíj Bizottság).

In this paper, the Leipzig Glossing conventions are augmented with the following: ine = inessive, QM = Q-marker, and vm = verbal modifier.

References

Bennett, David C. 1986. Towards an explanation of word-order differences between Slovene and Serbo-Croat. The Slavonic and East European Review 64, 1–24.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. 2018. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program], version 6.0.40. http://www.praat.org/ (retrieved 11 May 2018).Google Scholar
Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen. 1997. On the typology of wh-questions. London: Garland.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1977. On wh-movement. In Culicover, Peter W., Wasow, Thomas & Akmajian, Adrian (eds.), Formal syntax, 71–132. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Cole, Peter & Hermon, Gabriella. 1998. The typology of wh-movement: Wh-questions in Malay. Syntax 1, 221–258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cole, Peter & Hermon, Gabriella. 2000. Partial wh-movement: Evidence from Malay. In Lutz et al. (eds.), 101–130.Google Scholar
Dayal, Veneeta. 1994. Scope marking as indirect wh-dependency. Natural Language Semantics 2, 137–170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dayal, Veneeta. 2000. Scope-marking: Cross-linguistic variation in indirect dependency. In Lutz et al. (eds.), 157–193.Google Scholar
É. Kiss, Katalin. 2002. The syntax of Hungarian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fanselow, Gisbert. 2006. Partial wh-movement. In Everaert, Martin & van Riemsdijk, Henk (eds.), The Blackwell companion to syntax, vol. III, 437–492. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felser, Claudia. 2001. Wh-expletives and secondary predication: German partial wh-movement reconsidered. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 13, 5–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Firbas, Jan. 1976. A study in the functional perspective of the English and the Slavonic interrogative sentence. Brno Studies in English 12, 9–56.Google Scholar
Franks, Steven & King, Tracy Holloway. 2000. A handbook of Slavic clitics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Genzel, Susanne, Ishihara, Shinichiro & Surányi, Balázs. 2015. The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian. Lingua 165, 183–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Golden, Marija. 1996. Interrogative wh-movement in Slovene and English. Acta Analytica 14, 145–186.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Marc L. 2003. Word prosody in Slovene from a typological perspective. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 56, 234–251.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 2004. The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gvozdanović, Jadranka. 1999. South Slavic prosody. In van der Hulst, Harry (ed.), Word prosodic systems in the languages of Europe, 839–852. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Gyuris, Beáta & Mády, Katalin. 2013. Approaching the prosody of Hungarian wh-exclamatives. In Szigetvari, Péter (ed.), VLLXX: Papers presented to László Varga on his 70th birthday. http://seas3.elte.hu/VLlxx/gyuris-mady.html (accessed 22 June 2016).Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Lahiri, Aditi. 1991. Bengali intonational phonology. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 9, 47–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horvath, Julia. 1997. The status of ‘wh-expletives’ and the partial wh-movement construction of Hungarian. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 15, 509–572.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunyadi, László. 2002. Hungarian sentence prosody and Universal Grammar: On the prosody–syntax interface. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Jun, Sun-Ah(ed.). 2005. Prosodic typology: The phonology of tone and intonation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jun, Sun-Ah(ed.). 2014. Prosodic typology II: The phonology of intonation and phrasing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jurgec, Peter. 2007. Schwa in Slovenian is epenthetic. Presented at the 2nd Congress of the Slavic Linguistics Society, Berlin. www.hum.uit.no/a/jurgec/schwa.pdf(accessed 14 December 2011).Google Scholar
Kálmán, László. 1985a. Word order in neutral sentences. In Kenesei (ed.), 13–23.Google Scholar
Kálmán, László. 1985b. Word order in non-neutral sentences. In Kenesei (ed.), 25–37.Google Scholar
Kálmán, László, Prószéky, Gabor, Nádasdy, Ádám & Kálmán, C. György. 1986. Hocus, focus, and verb types in Hungarian infinitive constructions. In Abraham, Werner & de Meij, Sjaak (eds.), Topic, focus and configurationality: Papers from the 6th Groningen Grammar Talks, Groningen, 1984, 129–142. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenesei, István(ed.). 1985. Approaches to Hungarian, vol. 1: Data and descriptions. Szeged: JATE.Google Scholar
Kenesei, István. 1998a. Adjuncts and arguments in VP-focus in Hungarian. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 45, 61–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenesei, István. 1998b. On the syntactic options of focus. Ms., University of Szeged.Google Scholar
Křížková, Helena. 1972. Kontextové členĕní a typy tázacích vĕt v současných slovanských jazycích [Contextual organization (functional sentence perspective) and types of interrogative sentence in contemporary Slavonic languages]. Slavia 41, 241–262.Google Scholar
Laczkó, Tibor. 2014. An LFG analysis of verbal modifiers in Hungarian. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG 2014 Conference. Online: CSLI Publications http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/ (accessed 22 June 2016).Google Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 2008. Intonational phonology, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lecarme, Jacqueline. 1999. Focus in Somali. In Rebuschi, Georges & Tuller, Laurice (eds.), The grammar of focus, 275–309. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipták, Anikó. 2001. On the syntax of wh-items in Hungarian. Utrecht: LOT.Google Scholar
Lutz, Uli, Müller, Gereon & von Stechow, Arnim (eds.). 2000. Wh-scope marking. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mády, Katalin. 2015. Prosodic (non-)realisation of broad, narrow and contrastive focus in Hungarian: A production and a perception study. Interspeech 15 (Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Interspeech), 948–952.Google Scholar
Mády, Katalin & Szalontai, Ádám. 2014. Where do questions begin? Phrase-initial boundary tones in Hungarian polar questions. 7th International Conference on Speech Prosody (SP 2014), Dublin. http://real.mtak.hu/20307/1/MadySzalontaiPolarquestionsInitialtones_2014.pdf (accessed 22 June 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahajan, Anoop. 2000. Towards a unified treatment of wh-expletives in Hindi and German. In Lutz et al. (eds.), 317–332.Google Scholar
Marušič, Franc. 2008. CP under control. In Zybatow, Gerhild, Szucsich, Luka, Junghanns, Uwe & Meyer, Roland (eds.), Formal description of Slavic languages, 408–422. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Marušič, Franc. 2007. On the lack of a (PF) phase in non-finite clausal complements. Proceedings of ConSOLE XIV, 203–225.Google Scholar
Marušič, Franc & Žaucer, Rok. 2006. Review article on Janez Orešnik & Donald F. Reindl (eds.), Slovenian from a typological perspective, 2003. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 14, 123–160.Google Scholar
McDaniel, Dana. 1989. Partial and multiple wh-movement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 7, 565–604.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mycock, Louise. 2006. The typology of constituent questions: A Lexical-Functional Grammar analysis of ‘wh’-questions. Ph.D. thesis, The University of Manchester.Google Scholar
Mycock, Louise. 2010a. Prominence in Hungarian: Alignment and the syntax–prosody interface. In Mycock, Louise & Vincent, Nigel (eds.), The prosody–syntax connection, thematic issue of Transactions of the Philological Society 108, 265–297.Google Scholar
Mycock, Louise. 2010b. Multiple-clause constituent questions: Intonation and variation in Hungarian. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 57, 268–287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B.1980. The phonetics and phonology of English intonation. Ph.D. thesis, MIT.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. & Beckman, Mary E.. 1988. Japanese tone structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Puskás, Genoveva. 2000. Word order in Hungarian: The syntax of Ā-positions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riemsdijk, Henk van. 1983. The Correspondence Effect and the Empty Category Principle. In Otsu, Yukio, van Riemsdijk, Henk, Inoue, Kazuko, Kamio, Akio & Kawasaki, Noriko (eds.), Studies in Generative Grammar and language acquisition: A report on recent trends in linguistics, 5–16. Tokyo: Tokyo Gakugei University.Google Scholar
Rosenthall, Sam. 1992. The intonation of simple sentences in Hungarian. Papers from the 3rd Annual Formal Linguistics Society of Midamerica, 297–310.Google Scholar
Rudin, Catherine. 1988. On multiple questions and multiple fronting. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 6, 445–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saddy, Douglas. 1991. WH scope mechanisms in Bahasa Indonesia. In Cheng, L. & Demirdache, H. (eds.), More papers on wh-movement (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 15), 183–218.Google Scholar
Staudacher, Peter. 2000. Partial movement and compositionality. In Bayer, Josef & Römer, Christine (eds.), Von der Philologie zur Grammatiktheorie Peter Suchsland zum 65. Geburtstag, 191–211. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Šuštaršič, Rastislav. 2005. English–Slovene contrastive phonetic and phonemic analysis and its application in teaching English phonetics and phonology. Ljubljana: Znanstveni inštitut Filozofske fakultete.Google Scholar
Šuštaršič, Rastislav & Tivadar, Hotimir. 2005. Perception of tonemicity in Standard Slovene. Govor 22, 23–35.Google Scholar
Szabolcsi, Anna. 1997. Strategies for scope taking. In Szabolcsi, Anna (ed.), Ways of scope taking, 109–154. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szendrői, Kriszta. 2001. Focus and the syntax–phonology interface. Ph.D. thesis, University College London.Google Scholar
Toporišič, Jože. 1984. Slovenska slovnica [Slovene grammar], 2nd edn. Maribor: Založba Obzorja.Google Scholar
Varga, László. 2002. Intonation and stress: Evidence from Hungarian. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woznicki, Katherine. 2006. An acoustic analysis of word prosody in Ljubljana Slovene. Senior Honors thesis, The Ohio State University.Google Scholar