Louise Mycock

http://uk.geocities.com/loumy@btinternet.com/

Louise Mycock visited the Kempelen Farkas Speech Research Laboratory of the Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences in March/April 2006 in order to research Hungarian prosody in general and more specifically to collect and analyse data relating to pitch range manipulation and constituent question formation in Hungarian. The main aim of this work is to explore two hypotheses: that pitch range manipulation is a prosodic correlate of focus in Hungarian, and that focusing of question phrases at some structural level (prosodic and/or syntactic) is crucial to constituent question formation in Hungarian and cross-lingusitically.

The research undertaken at the laboratory will contribute to her PhD thesis The Typology of Constituent Questions: A Lexical Functional Grammar Analysis of ‘Wh’-Questions to be completed in 2006 at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Professor Nigel Vincent. This work will represent the first typology of constituent question formation strategies found in the world’s languages presented within the non-derivational framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). In the thesis, a movement analysis of constituent questions is rejected. It is argued that the prosodic and/or syntactic focusing of question phrases is crucial to the formation of constituent questions cross-linguistically and that, by treating different structural levels as equal, LFG’s parallel architecture is best suited to capturing the cross-linguistic features of and systematic differences between constituent question formation strategies.

Online Publications

(in press) 'Wh

-in-situ in Constituent Questions'

. Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG05 Conference, University of Bergen, Norway.

'The Wh-Expletive Construction'. In Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG04 Conference, University of Canterbury, New Zealand. 370-390.