We report the outcome of a production experiment addressing the intonation of different interrogative strategies in Navarro-Labourdin Basque (a variety spoken in France that has received no attention in the intonational literature do far). We study wh-movement, wh-in-situ and polar questions and show that the final raise associated to wh-in-situ and polar questions is very similar, which gives support to the hypothesis that in certain languages a single intonational Q-morpheme may underlie both types of constructions (Cheng & Rooryck 2000). Following Duguine & Irurtzun (2014) we suggest that this property of Navarro-Labourdin Basque may derive from its close contact with French, a language with similar interrogative properties.
Cite as: Duguine, M., Irurtzun, A. (2020) Prosody and Language Contact: An Experimental Investigation of Interrogative Strategies in Navarro-Labourdin Basque. Proc. Speech Prosody 2020, 740-743, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-151
@inproceedings{duguine20_speechprosody,
author={Maia Duguine and Aritz Irurtzun},
title={{Prosody and Language Contact: An Experimental Investigation of Interrogative Strategies in Navarro-Labourdin Basque}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2020},
pages={740--743},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-151}
}