Katalin Mády, Beáta Gyuris and Ádám Szalontai

Experimental investigations on the prosody of Hungarian exclamatives  

abstract The talk discusses the results of two recent experimental investigations on the prosody of root wh-interrogatives and wh-exclamatives in Hungarian. The first, production experiment showed that the prosodic distinction between the two sentence types lies in the fact that the wh-element bears a falling pitch accent in interrogatives, whereas pitch accents are rising in exclamatives. The second, perception experiment investigated the relevance of sentence-initial f0 as a potential trigger for the differences between the pitch accent patterns. The findings indicate that phrase-initial boundary tones are of relevance in Hungarian prosody. The talk also addresses some general questions and various opinions about the formal defining features of different sentence types.