Exhaustive movement, exhaustive tone: A syntactic-prosodic investigation of Gujarati

Abstract

Based on data collected from speakers of Gujarati, we investigate whether exhaustivity and narrow focus have same eect on the syntactic position of an object and on sentence prosody. The pre-verbal position, which is immediately above the vP in Gujarati has been associated with narrow focus (Joshi 2020), and here we also investigate whether that position also conveys exhaustivity (Kiss 2010). To probe how syntactic position and prosody influence and are influenced by interpretations of exhaustivity and narrow focus on an argument, we conducted production and listening tasks on 10 native speakers of Gujarati. Novel experimental data from the production task suggests that Gujarati speakers are primarily concerned in ensuring that the argument is conveyed as a narrow-focused argument vis-a-vis an exhaustively focused one, irrespective of syntactic position, whereas results from the listening task suggest that once prosody was controlled, participants were able to consider syntactic variation as a marker of exhaustivity and not just of narrow focus.