Intonation and its interfaces in Sardinian polar questions

In this paper we investigate the interplay between lexicon, syntax, intonation and pragmatics in Sardinian
polar questions. To this end, a production study was designed to elicit polar questions with different bias and
polarity conditions by means of the Discourse Completion Task Methodology. The resulting data were then prosodically
and syntactically annotated using Praat. The results can be summarized as follows. Regarding lexico-syntactic
markers, the particle a functions as a mitigator or politeness marker, whereas constituent fronting and negation correspond
to positive and negative polarity respectively. In addition, two main intonational patterns can be distinguished:
the ¡H+L* L% pattern, which expresses “lack of bias”, and the ¡H*+L L- pattern, which conveys the speaker
bias towards the proposition.