Stress, pitch accent, and beyond : intonation in Maltese questions

Abstract

Maltese question word interrogatives are shown to have an alternation in the association of postlexical tones with the question word. Tones associate with the left edge of the question word in direct questions, and with the lexically stressed syllable in indirect questions and when quoted. This alternation holds regardless of the metrical structure of the word. Maltese is thus the first language with lexical stress to be described as having a pragmatically conditioned alternation between fully-fledged pitch accents and pitch events without association to stress.