A prosodic account of wh-formation in Jordanian Arabic Ekab Al-Shawashreh a , Marwan Jarrah b, * , Moh’d Al-Omari c , Mutasim Al-Deaibes d a Assistant Professor, Yarmouk University, Jordan b Assistant Professor, The University of Jordan, Jordan c Assistant Professor, The Hashemite University, Jordan d Assistant Professor, Manitoba University, Canada Received 10 February 2019; received in revised form 3 August 2019; accepted 15 August 2019 Available online 5 October 2019 Abstract This paper shows that wh-formation in Jordanian Arabic (JA) is prosodically ruled. Wh-words should move either to the left or to the right periphery of the phonological phrase that contains the relevant wh-word. What appears as an in-situ instance of a wh-question in JA, as reported by several studies, is in fact a true instance of a moved wh-word but to the right periphery of the phonological phrase that contains the wh-word. Movement to either peripheral position is forced by prosodic facts of JA where elements that express or stand for the most prominent information of the question should bear prosodic prominence which falls on either peripheral positions of the phonological phrase containing the wh-word. A grammaticality judgment task was carried out to check the frequency of left and right peripheral questions in JA. Fifteen participants (all native speakers of JA) were asked to respond to nine contexts. The results show that the left peripheral option is far more frequent than its right peripheral counterpart (93.8% and 6.2%, respectively). The findings of this study make available empirical evidence in favor of Mathieu's (2016) theory of wh-formation where prosody is the main factor for wh-patterns in natural languages. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Jordanian Arabic; Left periphery; Prosody; Right periphery; Wh-questions 1. Introduction Since Chomsky (1971), wh-movement has been a richly-debated topic that has received a lot of attention from researchers working on different languages (e.g., Richards, 2001; Boškovi ć, 2018). One of the front-line issues that have been extensively discussed concerned the main motivation of movement of wh-phrases (or lack thereof) from their in-situ positions to the left peripheries of questions. Accounts of wh-movement include feature checking theory (Chomsky, 1995; Simpson, 2000), movement at Logical Form (Wahba, 1984; Srivastav, 1991; Aoun and Li, 1993; Watanabe, 1992, 2001, Abu-Sulaiman, 2007; Soltan, 2010), Clause Typing Hypothesis (Cheng, 1997), Q-morpheme (Baker, 1970; Cheng and Rooryck, 2000), Focus Q-morpheme (Lassadi, 2003, 2005, AlMomani and AlSaidat, 2010), www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Lingua 231 (2019) 102741 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: m.jarrah@ju.edu.jo, m.jarrah@ju.edu.jo (M. Jarrah). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2019.102741 0024-3841/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.