Asymmetry between Encoding and Decoding of Wh-scope in Japanese

It has been discussed in the recent literature that every Wh-question in Japanese must be accompanied by an appropriate prosodic (pitch) contour. Deguchi and Kitagawa (2002) and Ishihara (2003) point out that, for the speakers of Tokyo Japanese, the Wh-scope domain of a sentence correlates with the domain of focus prosody (henceforth FPD). The two alternative Wh-scope readings in (1) below contrast in the end position of FPD wherein the Wh-focus receives pitch prominence (indicated by bold-face capitals), followed by post-focal pitch-range reduction (henceforth PFR; indicated by a shade). The end of FPD is marked by post-COMP F0 rise (whose high tones indicated by capitals). This rise occurs at the matrix verb (e.g., tasikameta “confirmed”) in (1a) for subordinate Wh-scope, while no such rise takes place for matrix Wh-scope, and hence PFR continues through the sentence-final matrix Q-COMP in (1b). We will refer to the former prosodic pattern as "Local" FPD and the latter pattern as "Global" FPD.