Information Structure and Questions in Urdu/Hindi

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This project investigates questions in Urdu/Hindi by taking into accountinformation-structural considerations as well as intonational/prosodic information in addition to building on what is known about the morphosyntactic structure of questions in Urdu/Hindi. The project will focus on understanding interface issues with respect to non-canonical questions, i.e., on understanding how a given meaning is brought about compositionally via the interaction of several different components of grammar: prosodic phonology and the morphosyntax. The empirical phenomena to be studied involve: 1) varying word orders of wh-elements; 2) question particles in polar (yes/no) questions; 3) alternative questions;4) questions in interaction with embedded clauses. The formal modeling and analysis takes place within the architectural assumptions of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), which also comes with a computational grammar development platform. We implement our insights and analyses computationally in order to systematically test the details of the interaction at the interfaces of grammar modules with respect to non-canonical questions.