Prosody and processing of wh-in-situ questions in standard Persian
The syntactic literature offers different question types, one of which is the whquestion.
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.
