Prosody and sentence type in Dutch

Abstract

This article summarizes earlier research done on the prosodic marking of interrogativity and imperatives in Dutch on the basis of recorded speech from male and female speakers. The first part of this article compares statements (ST) and three types of question. The form of questions may differ in various respects from statements: Wh-questions (WH) have a question word in initial position and exhibit subject-verb inversion, yes/no-questions (YN) have inversion only, while declarative questions (DE) have the same structure as ST. Our functional hypothesis that the intensity of interrogativity marking through prosody counterbalances the degree of syntactic marking in the order ST