This special issue is dedicated to the syntax-prosody interface in non-canonical questions and originated in the international workshop Non-Canonical Questions at the Syntax-Prosody Interface, organised at the Université Paris Cité and held online in November 2020. Recent research has demonstrated that the phonology-syntax relation cannot solely account for prosodic structure, prosody being closely intertwined with discourse organisation, information structure and focus structure (Gussenhoven 1983, Féry 2001). Questions are a case in point, as they crucially call on the addressee before a proposition may be added to the common ground.

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers.

It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker’s expectations.

This project investigates the intonation of canonical (information-seeking) and non-canonical wh-in-situ echo questions conveying repetition and surprise in Northern Peninsular Spanish. Data from 14 female participants were collected via a contextualised elicitation task. The following correlates were examined: (i) the melodic curve of the wh-in-situ question, (ii) the nuclear peak (in Hz), (iii) the wh-tonal range (i.e. the difference between the lowest nuclear Low and the highest boundary High), and (iv) the nuclear contour. Results show that all wh-in-situ questions investigated display similar melodic curves and nuclear contours, but canonical questions have significantly lower nuclear peaks and wh-tonal ranges than non-canonical questions. Echo-repetition and echo-surprise questions also differ in nuclear peak and wh-tonal range. We propose a tentative analysis, whereby canonical in-situ questions have a final H% boundary tone, in contrast to non-canonical questions, which have an extra-High (upstepped) final boundary tone (¡H%).

In this paper, I examine the properties of a construction in Korean speech that has not received much attention in the literature. I refer to the construction in question as the ‘stranded embedded clause’ (SEC). SECs are a special type of echoed utterance, where an utterance in the form of an embedded clause is repeated for various reasons. The characteristic properties of the SEC involve the fact that there can be a mismatch between the type of the clause indicated by the clause type marker that they contain and the actual illocutionary force of the utterance that is indicated by its prosody. The complementizer is also obligatory, despite the fact that no matrix clause element shows up—hence, the name stranded embedded clause. I propose a deletion-based analysis of SECs, where they start out as a full-fledged embedded clause in a complex sentence and undergo movement, followed by deletion of the rest of the clause. It should be noted that this is essentially how fragment answers (and some other ellipsis constructions) have been analysed in the literature. Indeed, I show that there is a parallelism between SECs and fragment answers, which I argue provides support for the deletion-based approach to the former.

This article analyzes Knowledge Confirmation Questions (KCQ) in Basque, an instance of non-canonical questions that has not been analyzed yet. KCQs display three characteristic elements, namely, (i) a declarative-type syntax, (ii) an interrogative-like intonation, and (iii) the discourse particle ba; and are interpreted as follows: “Do you know that p?”. Here, I propose that the meaning contribution of KCQs derives from the interaction of these three elements. More precisely, I argue that their question-like intonation, which adds interrogative interpretation, takes scope over ba, which regulates the addressee’s Doxastic State and undergoes context shift. Basque KCQs constitute an interesting case study, because they raise some interesting questions on the syntactization of discourse and the properties of discourse particles, as they seem to contradict the assumption that discourse particles do not fall under the scope of sentential operators.

Recent research has shown that rhetorical questions (RQs) have certain prosodic characteristics in terms of voice quality, tempo, and intonation, which distinguish them from genuine, information-seeking questions (ISQs). This paper focuses on the interaction between prosodic cues to rhetorical meaning on the one hand, and lexical and morpho-syntactic means, on the other, in German. The production experiment reported on here addresses three research questions, in short: (i) do speakers prefer a specific syntactic construction for an RQ, (ii) do they make use of specific lexical and morpho-syntactic means to signal rhetorical meaning, and (iii) what is the interaction between those means and prosodic cues. The answers are: (i) yes (wh-questions), (ii) yes (especially discourse markers (DiPs)), and (iii) we find an additive effect enforcing the rhetorical message. When lexical (or morpho-syntactic) cues to rhetorical meaning are used, we do not observe a reduction in or lack of prosodic means at the same time. For example, when a DiP is present, an RQ will still have a typical nuclear accent and edge tone, i.e., cues are used in an additive, rather than an exclusive way. There are, however, RQs that are marked only in the prosody, without any lexical or morpho-syntactic cues present.

This study focuses on Estonian verb-complement structures, which include oblique (non-canonically marked) complements marked in spatial cases. Not all approaches agree on whether canonical arguments and oblique complements have argument status of the same type, but they do mostly agree that the two types of complement markings are used by different types of verbs. First, oblique case is viewed as always indexing the original semantics of the case (direct semantics), that is osutama ‘point at’ selecting an allative (‘onto’) complement. Second, oblique case usage is seen as referring to a restricted set of syntactic relations (indirect semantics), that is Estonian allative and adessive being used for marking Experiencers. In any case, oblique complement verbs are viewed as more semantically restricted than canonical object verbs. This study tests these two hypotheses in a quantitative corpus approach. In a non-semantically extracted sample of verbs (n = 232), it compares the lexical-semantic transitivity of oblique and canonical complement verbs in order to investigate the degree to which indirect semantic effects differentiate between the two types of verbs. In addition, it outlines direct semantic effects between oblique case frames in terms of semantic roles. Finally, it investigates the way these patterns are related to the cases’ individual grammaticalisation degrees.

We analyze genitive of negation (GN) in Lithuanian. When the verb is negated, GN is realized on an object that would otherwise be realized as accusative. We demonstrate that Lithuanian GN is a syntactic (in line with Arkadiev 2016) and morphological phenomenon in contrast to Russian GN, whose realization is influenced by semantic factors (e.g. Kagan 2013). It differs from Russian (Pesetsky 1982) in that (i) it is always assigned to a DP which would otherwise bear structural accusative regardless of its semantic properties, and (ii) it cannot affect a structural nominative DP regardless of whether it is an external or internal argument. Lithuanian GN, in this respect, is similar to Polish GN (e.g. Przepiórkowski 2000, Witkoś 2008). We offer a three-layered approach to case, arguing that GN is a reflection of structural object case, assigned in syntax, then translated to morphological genitive case at PF and, finally, realized at Vocabulary Insertion (Halle & Marantz 1993). Thus, structural object case has two morphological realizations: as genitive under negation or as accusative in the absence of negation. Lithuanian also exhibits long-distance GN (Arkadiev 2016), showing that case boundaries can cross non-finite clauses without an overt CP element, suggesting these are not phases.

We provide a variety of empirical arguments in favor of a paratactic account of recomplementation constructions, in which a left-dislocated element appears in between two complementizers. Contrary to integrated analyses assuming Complementizer Phrase (CP) recursion or Rizzi’s split periphery, we assume that the dislocated phrase is structurally independent from the embedded clause it precedes, which in turn is an elliptical sentence fragment. The juxtaposed fragmentary sentences are linked by the doubled complementizer, which serves to overtly flag a ‘restart’ in discourse. We show that this account makes a range of welcome predictions while sidestepping non-trivial problems that arise for integrated/cartographic analyses, which assume that dislocated XPs are in left-peripheral positions (such as Spec-TopicP) and that the doubled complementizer spells out Topic0. A further advantage of the approach is that it provides a handle on recomplementation constructions beyond the core cases involving left-dislocation, which reduce to a mere subcase of the general phenomenon of elliptical ‘restarts’ in discourse.