Dissertation
Prosody and processing of wh-in-situ questions in standard Persian
On April 4th, Zohreh Shiamizadeh succesfully defended her doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Zohreh on this great result.
- Author
- Zohreh Shiamizadeh
- Date
- 04 April 2018
- Links
- Full text in Leiden University Repository
Abstract
The syntactic literature offers different question types, one of which is the wh-question. There are languages, including Persian, in which the wh-phrase is not required to move to sentence-initial position in order to form a wh-question. It has been shown that prosody contributes to the production and perception of the contrast between declarativity and interrogativity, notably in interrogative utterances lacking lexico-syntactic features of interrogativity. Accordingly, it may be proposed that prosody plays a role in encoding and decoding wh-in-situ questions in which the interrogativity feature (the wh-phrase) does not move to sentence-initial position, as, for example, in Persian. The role of prosodic correlates in marking different parts of wh-in-situ questions as opposed to declaratives is, however, an understudied research area in Persian prosody. Further understudied topics include the role of prosodic correlates in the identification of wh-in-situ questions before the occurrence of the wh-phrase. This dissertation focuses on a series of experiments on the production and perception of wh-in-situ questions in standard Persian.