The diachrony of question particles

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One common strategy for marking questions in the world’s languages is the use of a question/interrogative particle. These question particles are standardly thought of as typing a particular clause as interrogative. However, more detailed investigations of a range of languages (e.g. Chinese, Macedonian, Turkish, Urdu/Hindi) show that the situation is more complex and that the question particles serve to express a pragmatically marked question of some type. These special pragmatic functions have been difficult to pin down and a detailed comparative study of their precise function and how that relates to their diachronic origins has not been undertaken to date. This project aims to fill this gap by means of a two-pronged strategy: in-depth corpus-based investigation of the diachronies of question particles in a handful of languages (most prominently Chinese and the early Germanic languages), on theone hand, and typological investigation of a sample of the world’s languages on the other hand. The aim is to establish generalizations about attested and probable patterns of homonymy/polysemy for question particles, and the grammatical pathways that give rise to them.