Focus without pitch boost: focus sensitivity in Japanese why-questions and its theoretical implications

Abstract

Unlike typical wh-questions, why-questions are known to be focus-sensitive, but the linguistic realization of their focus sensitivity shows an unexpected pattern in Japanese. The phrase that immediately follows a causal wh-phrase can be considered as the focus associate without any focal prominence. This prosodic pattern contradicts the generally accepted view that a focused phrase invariably receives focal prominence (pitch boost) in Japanese. The paper presents an analysis based on focus movement for this surprising prosodic pattern. We characterize the focus sensitivity of a why-question as an association-with-focus effect with the silent focus exhaustivity operator. The adjacency of a causal wh-phrase and the focus associate is a result of the focus movement to the operator position, which mimics the focus movement proposed by some of the advocates of focus association by movement (Krifka in The Architecture of Focus 82:105, 2006; Wagner in Natural Language Semantics 14(4):297-324, 2006; as reported by Erlewine (Movement out of focus, 2014)). We argue that the adjacency strategy, which places a focus associate immediately after why, is a syntactic manifestation of association with focus, and that this structural disambiguation makes prosodic marking unnecessary. The proposal brings a functional perspective to the syntax–semantics–prosody correspondence in such a way that a focus-marked phrase does not automatically lead to prosodic prominence and the phonological interpretation of focus is influenced by the consideration of usefulness.