PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper proposes a new understanding of word order variation in Urdu/Hindi questions. We focus on the occurrence of immediately postverbal questions within the verbal complex as recently discussed by Bhatt and Dayal (2007) and Manetta (2012). We propose that the placement of wh-constituents in these structures is due to informational structural concerns. This tallies with the fact that word order variation in Urdu/Hindi is generally associated with information structural effects (Gambhir 1981). In particular, we argue for the following scenario. The default position for focus is immediately preverbal. As whconstituents are inherent focus attractors, they are placed there by default and are marked prosodically via a high pitch contour, whereby all following material is realized at a lower pitch. However, if the verb is to be in focus, then this constellation is unoptimal as the verb needs to be marked by the high pitch contour. We therefore propose that the immediately postverbal, verb cluster internal position of a wh-constituent occurs only when the verb is in focus and is motivated by prosodic reasons which in turn interact with syntactic and information structural concerns. We present our analysis in terms of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), which provides a complex, modular and interacting architecture that includes (morpho)syntactic, semantic, prosodic and information-structural components each in their own right. We integrate Krifka’s (2008) ideas on information structure into our LFG analysis and further draw on Beaver and Velleman’s (2011) and Büring’s (2015) ideas on second occurrence focus to explain the syntactic positioning and prosodic patterning of the verb and the wh-constituent in verb focus contexts.