How prosody disambiguates between Alternative and Polar Questions

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the function of prosody in disambiguating Polar Questions and Alternative Questions from English. Based on data from Basque and Finnish, and existing ingredients in the literature, I propose that the underlying disambiguating principle is that the syntax-semantics mapping and the prosody-discourse mapping have to be coherent with each other. In evaluating coherence, I crucially take Maximize Informativity to apply to both QUD and utterance level and I propose that two criteria for coherence have to be met: there has to be a proper motherQ-daughter Q relation and a daughterQ cannot be presuppositionally heavier than its motherQ.