| Description |
Urdu/Hindi is a language with SOV default word order in which polar
questions have a declarative syntax and in which constituent-questions
have generally be characterized as being in situ. However, as
Urdu/Hindi allows major constituents to scramble, including
wh-constituents, wh-words may also be found in various postverbal
positions. In our overall work, we are currently seeking to
understand the word order variation in terms of information-structural
factors.
In this talk, we concentrate on immediately postverbal occurrences of
wh-constituents within the verbal complex. No satisfactory account
exists for these to date. Instead of seeking to develop a purely
syntactic account, we bring in evidence from intonation and pragmatics
to show that wh-elements are placed immediately postverbally and
within the verbal complex when situations of verb focus obtain. The
immediately postverbal wh-element is then also effectively defocused.
We thus show that an understanding of word order in languages like
Urdu/Hindi must necessarily involve an understanding of how prosody
interacts with word order and pragmatics (information
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