Summary Details
| Query: |
Sum: Verbal interrogatives (11.119)
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| Author: | Lameen Souag | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Language Documentation
Morphology Syntax Typology |
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| 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 |
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| LL Issue: | 11.126 | |
| Date Posted: | 22-Jan-2000 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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