The diachrony of question particles

在世界语言中，标记疑问句的一种常用策略是使用疑问句/疑问助词。这些疑问句通常被认为是将一个特定的从句打造成疑问句。然而，对一系列语言（如汉语、马其顿语、土耳其语、乌尔都语/印地语）进行更详细的调查表明，情况更为复杂，疑问助词用于表达某种类型的语用标记问题。这些特殊的语用功能很难确定，迄今为止还没有对它们的精确功能及其与历时起源的关系进行详细的比较研究。本项目旨在通过双管齐下的策略来填补这一空白：一方面，对少数语言（最突出的是汉语和早期日耳曼语言）中疑问句的历时性进行深入的基于语料库的调查，另一方面，对世界语言样本进行类型学调查。目的是建立关于疑问句同音/多义的已证实的和可能的模式的概括，以及产生它们的语法途径。

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.