Clarifying the Common Ground: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation of the Form and Pragmatic Function of Reprise Questions and Reprise Fragments
Although there is general agreement that reprise questions and fragments trigger non-default common ground updates, there is no consensus about the precise nature of these updates, how they are triggered, and if/how the pragmatic function of reprise questions is connected to their exceptional morphosyntactic form. This project broadens and sharpens the empirical picture by undertaking a cross-linguistic comparative study of the morphosyntax and prosody of reprise questions/fragments in English, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, and Russian, using acceptability judgment experiments and prosodic production and perception experiments. This enriched dataset will be utilized to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of current competing analyses.
