Prosody and wh-scope in Osaka Japanese
Hitomi Minamida
June 2020 

It has been claimed that Tokyo Japanese is insensitive to wh-islands when the appropriate prosody is assigned (Deguchi & Kitagawa 2002, Ishihara 2003, a.o.). Embedded scope (ES) prosody yields an ES reading, while matrix scope (MS) prosody yields an MS reading. But as pointed out by Hirotani (2005), no perception experiments have been conducted in support of this claim. Hirotani’s own experiments showed that while ES prosody gives us one (ES) interpretation, MS prosody gives us two interpretations (ES and MS). This paper presents new findings from a pilot survey on the interaction of wh-scope and prosody in Osaka Japanese (OJ). The survey showed results similar to Hirotani’s (2005) experiments: with MS prosody, there was no strong preference between the two interpretations. Acceptability ratings elicited in the survey suggest that the OJ subjects found MS prosody ill-formed; uncertainty about interpretation may be due to this ill-formedness. I compare the OJ findings with H.K. Hwang’s (2015) results for Tokyo Japanese, Fukuoka Japanese, and Busan Korean and suggest a possible explanation for the difference in acceptability of MS prosody across these varieties.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005534 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of Japanese/Korean Linguistics 27
keywords:	japanese, korean, wh-scope, syntax-prosody interface, wh-islands, syntax, phonology
Downloaded:	446 times

 

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