Beste Kamali (Bielefeld)

Dissecting broad focus polar questions in Turkish: Bias and phonological phrasing



This talk will be about the two morphosyntactic manifestations of broad focus in Turkish polar questions. I first show that there are two corresponding form differing in the placement of the question clitic. I will describe their uses in detail and conccude that the ability to express evidential bias is the formal determiner of the distributions. Next I show that evidential bias goes with unmarked phonological phrasing whereas its counterpart follows in essence the prosodic realization of givenness. I review some more languages that share this property and attempt to explain why some others, like English, seem not to.