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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Summary Details


Query:   Sum: Verbal interrogatives (11.119)
Author:  Lameen Souag
Submitter Email:  click here to access email
Linguistic LingField(s):   Syntax

Summary:   Thanks a lot to everyone who sent examples. Verbal interrogatives in fact
seem to be embarrassingly frequent (particularly around the Pacific rim by
some odd coincidence.) Here are the cases sent in:

John Koontz:
Typical Siouan languages have a verb 'to say what/something'. In
Omaha-Ponca: edehe 'what did I say', edes^e 'what did you say', ede?
'what did he say'. Also in Dakotan, e.g., Teton (Lakota).

Norvin Richards:
Ponapeian has interrogative verbs that mean things like "go
where?"--Rehg discusses these in his grammar of Ponapeian.
I've also heard Tagalog speakers inflect _ano_, the word for 'what', as a
verb (and my Tagalog dictionary, by Leo English, lists this as a
possibility)--that gets you sentences like:
1. Umano ka diyan?
Past-what you there
'What did you do there?'
(the Tagalog verb _ano_ can also mean 'do something'. Don't know about the
Ponapeian one)

Just ran across another one: Lardil (Australian, probably Pama-Nyungan)
has a verb _ngajuwa_ 'to do something, to do what?':
Ngajuwathu nyi bilaanku?
do-what-FUT you tomorrow
'What are you doing tomorrow?'

Eloise Jelinek:
The Coast Salish languages of the Northwestern U.S. have been claimed
to lack a noun/verb contrast at the lexical level. There are basic
roots which appear with inflectional material, deriving either an
NP or a VP. There are roots meaning "do something/what" or "say
something/what", etc., in these languages, as in
steN=sxW "What are you doing?"
do:what/something=2sgNOM
c@ '@ns-steN "the thing that you do"
the 2sPOSS-do:what/something

Garland D. Bills:
Although it's not real clearcut, there is something that is kind of like a
verbal interrogative in Quechua. The interrogative forms in Quechua function
as both interrogatives and indefinites (typically but not always with
different discourse suffixes attached, but I'll ignore those here), e.g.
_pi_ who, someone', _ima_ what, something'. The latter occurs with a suffix
(that may have once been a verbalizing suffix but doesn't seem to be
productive now) to produce what might be called a "verbal
interrogative/indefinite" stem: _ima-na-_ happen, do what, do something'.
My impression is that it's not terribly productive, tending to occur in
expressions like the following:
ima-na-saq (-saq = 1 sg future)
What shall I do?
ima-na-su-rqa (-su = 2 obj, -rqa = past)
What happened to you?

Martin Haspelmath:
Nivkh (Gilyak), an isolate of Sakhalin, has the verbs jad' 'do
what?' and jaGod' 'be like what?', as in: ytyk jad'?
'What is father doing?' (ytyk = father)

Gregory D. S. Anderson:
There are in fact a number of languages that have verbal interrogatives. The
Siberian Turkic language Tuvan (Tyvan) is one such language. Both South
Munda and North Munda, Austroasiatic languages of east-central India
(Orissa, Bihar) possess interrogatives used verbally 'to what, to how' etc.

The list is long enough to make me feel rather naive. I wonder if there are
any pre/postpositional interrogatives...

Lameen Souag

LL Issue: 11.126
Date Posted: 22-Jan-2000
Original Query: Read original query


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