Scope, Prosody, And Pitch Accent: The Prosodic Marking Of Wh-Scope In Two Varieties Of Japanese And South Kyeongsang Korean

摘要

This dissertation investigates the prosodic marking of the semantic scope of wh-phrases in Tokyo Japanese (TJ), Fukuoka Japanese (FJ) and South Kyeongsang Korean (SKK). While the interface between prosody and syntax in TJ has attracted intensive recent interest, the experimental approach pursued in this study addresses the issues which have not been resolved in previous research. It expands the scope of the investigation to include relatively understudied varieties of Japanese and Korean. In addition, it takes information/discourse structure into account, and it focuses on experimental verification of crucial questions such as the relationship between wh and focus intonation. The scope of wh-phrases in TJ is marked by F0 compression, exhibiting a resemblance to the prosodic pattern of a contrastive focus. In FJ and SKK, on the other hand, wh-scope is marked by a high flat F0 contour and the deletion of accents on the material inside the domain, indicating that the prosodic whscope marking and focus marking are distinct. Also, it is argued that the accent type of a wh-phrase determines the implementation of the prosodic scope marking: a rising tone yields the high plateau pattern whereas a falling tone yields F0 compression. Based on the characteristics of the prosodic scope marking, two i constructions are examined in which the domain of the prosodic scope marking potentially does not correspond to any syntactic constituent. Embedded scope questions with long-distance wh-scrambling have received little attention and varying claims have been made in the literature about their prosodic scope marking. The results of the investigation of this construction reveal that the right edge of the wh-scope marking aligns with the embedded complementizer regardless of the surface position of the wh-phrase. The other construction involves an in-situ wh-phrase taking matrix scope. The widely accepted wh-island effect is held to block a wh-phrase from taking scope out of a wh-island. However, the results of a production test and a comprehension test demonstrate that both pragmatic context and prosodic scope marking can ameliorate the wh-island effect, highlighting the need for an expanded scope of analysis, one which incorporates the interactivity of prosody, syntax, and information structure observed here.