| Summary: | <p style="text-align:justify;">The formation of constituent (‘wh’) questions has traditionally been the concern of syntax. Such questions, however, exhibit typical patterns of intonation which are of intrinsic interest to phoneticians. In this paper, I explore the prosody of two languages, Hungarian and Japanese, which in terms of their syntax appear to employ distinct strategies of constituent question (CQ) formation. However, spoken data reveal that, rather than being unrelated, the CQ formation strategies exemplified by these languages represent different versions of a single underlying CQ formation strategy. The role of prosody in CQ formation is revealed to be a key research topic not only for phoneticians, but for any researcher who seeks to understand how linguistic structure underpins typological variation.1 </p>
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