Search

Van Heuven and Haan's (2000, 2002) experimental work on the prosody of Dutch question types found that the prosodic signalling of interrogativity is stronger for declarative questions, less so for yes/no-questions and even less so for wh-questions. This paper shows how the sequence established on prosodic grounds (declarative questions > yes/no questions > wh questions > statements) is mirrored in the functional hierarchy in syntax. Prosody therefore provides an argument for a detailed left periphery (Rizzi 1997, 2001; Haegeman & Hill 2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A crosslinguistic survey of the expression of polarity emphasis reveals that some such expressions are subject to the distributional constraints typical of main clause phenomena, while others are not. The former have received a fairly homogeneous syntactic analysis, implicating specific left peripheral projections. The non-restricted variety, however, is not analysed uniformly with some phenomena receiving a fully syntactic account and others being accounted for in terms of semantics and pragmatics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article discusses the distributional and interpretive properties of three quantifiers such as no/nothing, SQUAT and zero. By applying syntactic tests, it illustrates that no/nothing can generate both syntactic and semantic sentential negation, on the contrary, SQUAT and zero can only produce to a semantic sentential negation. Using Beghelli's clause structure for such quantifiers, it concludes that SQUAT cannot get a cardinal, in situ, and an interpretation.