The structure of wh-utterances and the interpretation of wh-words in Romance (and Germanic) languages

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Georg A. Kaiser
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 240796339

This project deals with word-order variation in utterances with wh-words across (old and modern) Romance languages. The central aim is to investigate the source of optional strategies in wh-utterances and the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics as well as prosody in the construction of meaning. There are two main goals. Our first goal is to examine the syntactic strategies available to language to constrain inquisitive interpretations. To this end, we investigate microvariation in the Romance family (Spanish, French and (Brazilian) Portuguese as well as Italian and Raeto-Romance) building on our previous work on wh-in-situ questions and adding and extending it to echo questions, why-interrogatives (which present an interesting case regarding their availability with both subject-verb and verb-subject order), as well as quirky non-standard wh-clauses that we call qué-questions. Focusing mainly on echo questions (in Romance and Germanic languages) and qué-questions (mainly in Spanish), our second goal is to examine how the grammar encodes the relations between discourse moves. Questions provide a privileged window into the study of how discourse (structural) dependencies affect the overall interpretation of utterances. By examining the grammatical devices that modulate discourse relations we will develop a theory that allows sentence interpretation to be sensitive to discourse structure.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2111: Questions at the Interfaces (QI)
• International Connection: USA
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Maria Biezma, Ph.D.