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LINGUIST List 19.1353

Tue Apr 22 2008

Qs: WH-Question, Exhaustivity in Salish Languages

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        1.    Zhiguo Xie, WH-Question, Exhaustivity in Salish Languages
Message 1: WH-Question, Exhaustivity in Salish Languages
Date: 19-Apr-2008
From: Zhiguo Xie <culinguistgmail.com>
Subject: WH-Question, Exhaustivity in Salish Languages
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I am looking for some help with Salish data. Any input on the following
regards would be greatly appreciated.

1. Is St'át'imcets (or other Salish languages) a wh-in-situ language? If
not, is wh-in-situ an option for St'át'imcets (or other Salish languages)?

2. In a 2004 paper on the cleft construction on Salish languages, Lisa
Matthewson and her colleagues noted that in the two Salish languages they
investigated, clefts only has a week, cancelable exhaustivity. Let us focus
on a context where the cleft is non-exhaustive. Is the wh-in-situ Salish
equivalent of the following (if it exists) grammatical:

i. */?? It is who that you saw in town? (cleft, wh-in-situ, not an echo
question, intended to mean ‘who is it that you saw in town?’

3. How about the Salish equivalent of the following, where an exhaustivity
marker ‘only’ is used?

ii. */??Only the priest saw who in town? (wh-in-situ, not an echo question,
‘only’ associates with ‘the priest’, intended to meaning ‘who is the person
x such that only the priest saw x in town)

Thank you very much

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                            Semantics
                            Syntax
                            Typology
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