The sound and the query
In linguistic terms, a question is largely the re-ordering of a statement. Shuffle the words around, make a couple of other changes, and “John rode a horse” becomes “What did John ride?”Linguists call this re-arranging of words “wh-movement,” due to the wh-words used in questions (who, when, and so on) and they believe it occurs in two forms. English displays what linguists call “overt wh-movement,” in which word order is shuffled heavily, since many questions begin with wh-words. (There are exceptions: “John rode a what?”) But some languages, like Japanese, deploy “covert wh-movement,” in which word order remains largely intact as a statement becomes a question, and the wh-words appear in a variety of locations.But what determines which of these options a given language uses? In a new book, “Uttering Trees,” MIT linguistics professor Norvin Richards asserts that if we carefully study prosody — the way the pitch of our...