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Miriam Butt: Word Order Variation in Urdu/Hindi Wh-Constituent Questions

Urdu/Hindi is traditionally characterized as an SOV language in which major constituents can scramble and which has wh-in-situ (Bayer and Cheng 2015). However, a closer investigation reveals that the default position for wh-words in constituent questions is in fact the immediately preverbal position. This position has also been shown to be the focus position (Gambhir 1981, Butt and King 1996, Butt and King 1997, Kidwai 2000) in Urdu/Hindi. Manetta (2012) demonstrates that wh-phrases have the same kind of scrambling possibilities as normal NPs. So, wh-words can in principle appear anywhere in the clause. In this talk, we report on a study in which we looked at the word order variation of wh-constituents as found in 12 Bollywood scripts. Bollywood scripts are ideal for a study of the pragmatic effects attendent with word order variation because they: a) represent natural speech; b) provide a rich context via the story line and the visual information in the movie; c) allow for an investigation of the prosodic properties of the utterance. We find that the overwhelming number of wh-constituents are found in the immediately preverbal position, the focus position. These tend to be straight-forward information seeking (ISQ) questions, but are not confined to them. When wh-constituents are found in other positions, on the other hand, the overwhelming tendency is for a non-information seeking interpretation (NISQ), which includes expressions of outrage or self-addressed questions. The examples also illustrate that there is no one-to-one correspondence between position of the wh-constituent and question type. Rather, there is a complex interaction between word order, information-structure and prosody that serves to determine whether a question is ISQ vs.~NISQ and the particular type of NISQ that is realized. We illustrate this interaction in terms of a prosody-syntax-pragmatics interface based on Bögel's (2015) parallel architecture Butt et al. (2017).


December 22, 2022
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