Soare Why is ‘Why’ Unique?

Its Syntactic and Semantic Properties
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-11-067521-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 142, 324 Seiten

Reihe: Studies in Generative Grammar [SGG]ISSN

considers the behaviour of this peculiar -element across many different languages, including Ewe, Trevisan, Italian, Basque, German, Dutch, Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Hebrew. In ten original chapters, the authors explore various aspects of -questions, such as the way interacts with V2 constructions in Basque, with a subject clitic in Trevisan or how its morpho-syntactic make-up determines its merge position in Ewe, to mention but a few. Furthermore, a clear-cut distinction is established between high and low reason adverbials which are subsequently examined in -stripping environments in Dutch.

Beyond proper, the book explores a special class of -expressions in some in-situ languages which give rise to unexpected -construals with a touch of whining force. The objective is to explain the unusual syntactic position of these -expressions as well as their association with peculiar pragmatics. The questions are addressed for Cantonese: are -initial sentences genuine questions? To what extent are Cantonese -initial sentences similar to -initial sentences in Mandarin? Beside these -as- questions, a special class of rhetorical questions, the doubly-marked interrogatives in Hebrew, come under scrutiny.

Why is ‘why’ unique also concerns the interface with prosody and several experimental studies investigate precisely this aspect.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Soare, Gabriela

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Grammatik, Syntax, Morphologie

Über Autor(innen)

Gabriela Soare, Université de Genève, Switzerland.