Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bocci, Giuliano
• Bonan, Caterina
• Buell, Leston Chandler
• Catasso, Nicholas
• Cheng, Lisa Lai-Shen
• Corver, Norbert
• Cruschina, Silvio
• Doron, Edit
• Endo, Yoshio
• Irurtzun, Aritz
• Rizzi, Luigi
• Shlonsky, Ur
• Soare, Gabriela
• Soare, Gabriela[Herausgeber]
• Tsai, Wei-Tien Dylan
• Wolf, Lavi

Titel

Why is ‘Why’ Unique? : Its Syntactic and Semantic Properties

Ort / Verlag

Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter Mouton

Erscheinungsjahr

[2021]

Link zu anderen Inhalten

• Cover

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Why is ‘Why’ Unique? Its Syntactic and Semantic Properties considers the behaviour of this peculiar wh-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 why-questions, such as the way why 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 why-stripping environments in Dutch. Beyond why proper, the book explores a special class of wh-expressions in some in-situ languages which give rise to unexpected why-construals with a touch of whining force. The objective is to explain the unusual syntactic position of these wh-expressions as well as their association with peculiar pragmatics. The questions are addressed for Cantonese: are what-initial sentences genuine questions? To what extent are Cantonese what-initial sentences similar to how-initial sentences in Mandarin? Beside these what-as-why 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