Polar kya and the Prosody-Syntax-Pragmatics Interface

This paper reports on part of a larger investigation of polar questions in Urdu/Hindi. Our overall study is concerned with how the interfaces between prosody, syntax, and semantics/pragmatics interact with respect to forming non-canonical readings for questions. In this paper, we focus on the prosody-syntax interface in particular and show how this is crucial for disambiguating between the polar and the wh-constituent uses of Urdu/Hindi kya 'what'. We work with the architecture of the prosody-syntax interface developed by Bogel (2015) and show how prosodic information guides syntactic disambiguation, which in turn results in the activation of the appropriate semantic information (polar vs. wh-constituent readings).