Wh-intonation and the long distance-scrambling puzzle in Tokyo Japanese

This chapter is an investigation into the relationship between prosody and the semantic scope of wh-phrases in South Kyeongsang Korean (henceforth SKK), spoken in southeastern Korea; Fukuoka Japanese (henceforth FJ), spoken in southwestern Japan; and Tokyo Japanese (henceforth TJ). Its chief innovation is to take information structure seriously into account. Unlike Standard Korean, SKK is known as a pitch-accent language in which the pitch accents are lexically determined, as in Japanese.

TJ has been the most extensively studied among the languages at least in impressionistic terms. However, it is clear that closer experimental investigation is called for, as contradictory conclusions are reached, and experimental evidence is generally lacking in the literature. Further, information structure has not been adequately controlled for in previous work. In this chapter, in addition to TJ, I would like to explore two more languages, FJ and SKK, to which little attention has been paid in the prosodic literature. FJ and SKK are instructive cases since the two languages exhibit the same correspondence as TJ between the semantic scope of wh-phrases and prosody. Moreover, the intonation pattern triggered by a wh-phrase (henceforth wh-intonation) is particularly unusual in these varieties in that lexical pitch accents are completely lost in the semantic scope of a wh-phrase. These characteristics make it possible that wh-intonation in FJ and SKK is distinguished from f0 boost or compression of a word triggered by other discourse-associated factors. In investigating these two languages, I not only seek to identify the correlation of information structure and syntactic structure with phonetic realization, but also wish to understand what is intrinsic and what is variable in the correlation.