The Prosody-Syntax Interface of Polar Questions: Evidence from German and English First Language Acquisition

• Applicant: Dr. Muna Schönhuber
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 240796339

P-7 focuses on the interaction of syntax and prosody in English and German polar questions andon the interplay of these modules in children¿s developing grammars. In both languages, canonicalpolar questions are characterized by question intonation and word order. Previous studies suggesta principal role of prosody in children¿s processing of interrogatives, but insights into the exactmechanisms at play is lacking. Word order takes longer to acquire than intonation contours. Nostudies are available yet which reveal how children¿s increase of syntactic complexity ininterrogatives in production is related to comprehension, and how syntactic complexity isconditioned by intonation or vice versa. We aim to fill this gap taking into account the considerationthat the study of the acquisition of polar questions is essential for our understanding of interfaceissues. The complexity of prosodic cues and syntactic rules marking declaratives and polarquestions means that a better understanding of how children learn these aspects will help us tounravel the interaction of semantics, prosody and syntax in general. By comparing learners fromstructurally related though in many aspects essentially different languages, it will be possible todevelop a more profound knowledge of how closely prosody and syntax are related.Main questions addressed are (i) when do children become aware of verb position as a cue forcoding polar questions and (ii) how does this newly acquired knowledge interact with the intonationcue? The focus is on monolingual children aged 2 to 4 and their capacity to deal with sentenceswith a main verb and without a modal verb and sentences with copula be plus a predicate nounwithout a modal verb.In addition to replicating experiments for English, we will collect data for German. This allowsus to draw conclusions about the acquisition of inversion of the main verb/copula be, aphenomenon that is present in both languages but which has a different status (default syntacticmarker for polar questions in German, more exceptional in English, where main verbs require doPROPOSALsupport). The focus on prosody will help to gain a better understanding of the prosody-syntaxinterface and the relative weight of the two components in the course of development. As thestudies focus on production and interpretation of syntax-prosody combinations, the data will alsoshed light on the question whether coding by multiple grammar modules is redundant or not. Wewill collect production and comprehension data based on closely matched stimulus material todirectly compare receptive and productive development. The interplay of syntactic and prosodicstructures in the stimulus material and the different options for combination result in both canonicaland non-canonical utterance types. This will provide an extra layer to the investigation forcanonical and non-canonical meanings of the sentence types under investigation for such an earlyage.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2111: Questions at the Interfaces (QI)
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Janet Grijzenhout