제보적 의문문의 문장강세 = Sentence Accent in Information Questions

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study is to examine the formal and pragmatic principles which govern the placement of sentence accent in information questions. It is presumed that the relevant principles cohere with the theory of information structure of the information question at the time of an utterance. This theory concerns the morphosyntactic and prosodic encoding of the topic, focus and activation statuses of referents in discourse. The placement of sentence accent depends on the three kinds of pragmatic presuppositions, namely, knowledge presupposition, consciousness presupposition, and topicality presupposition, which correspond to different kinds of assumptions a speaker may have with regard to the addressee`s state of mind at the time of an utterance. Information questions present a challenge to a theory of information structure. Their prosodic structure cannot be described in terms of the function that is ordinarily attributed to sentence accent, namely focus marking. In order to understand the problem of information question prosody, we need to understand the function of sentence accent in general (Ladd 1978, Selkirk 1984, Rochemont 1986). And we also need to acknowledge the three types of focus-articulation: argument focus, predicate focus, and sentence focus (Lambrecht 1994). Information questions have idiosyncratic prosodic properties: they require the marking of topic rather than focus status, but they permit the prosodic marking of focus in different contexts. At the same time, information questions appear to inherit general prosodic properties: an account of the placement of sentence accent in information questions requires reference to general principles which are also invoked by the declarative constructions.