This production study investigates the interaction of prosody, word order and information structure with respect to wh-constituents in Urdu. We contrasted immediately preverbal wh-constituents with immediately postverbal ones. The preverbal position is the default focus position in Urdu; the appearance of wh-constituents in the immediately postverbal position within the verbal complex is not well understood. In order to test various possible factors governing the appearance of immediately postverbal wh-constituents, target sentences with wh-constituents in both pre- and postverbal positions were presented in different pragmatic contexts and given to native speakers to pronounce. The results show a clear difference in prosodic realization between the pre- and the postverbal position. The preverbal position is consistent with focus prosody, the postverbal wh-phrases appear to occur when the verb is in focus.
Cite as: Jabeen, F., Bögel, T., Butt, M. (2015) Immediately postverbal questions in urdu. Proc. Interspeech 2015, 943-947, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2015-17
@inproceedings{jabeen15_interspeech,
author={Farhat Jabeen and Tina Bögel and Miriam Butt},
title={{Immediately postverbal questions in urdu}},
year=2015,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2015},
pages={943--947},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2015-17}
}