A cross-linguistic study of (a)symmetries in polar interrogatives

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In Romanian, the difference between statements and yes-no questions is often simply a matter of uttering the former with rising intonation, as Maria doarme 'Mary is sleeping' and Maria doarme? 'is Mary sleeping?' suggest. Similarly, the Indonesian language of Maybrat can just add the particle a to any statement and turn it into a yes-no question (Dol 1999: 199-201). From the perspective of Miestamo's (2005) (a)symmetry concept -i.e. the linguistic expression of domain f(X) differs from that of X (not) only in the occurrence of the f() marker-the relation between the so-called "declarative" and "polar interrogative" clause types in such languages can be characterised as symmetric: they only vary in the prosodic or grammatical feature marking one as the question counterpart of the other. However, the relation can be asymmetric, too. The asymmetry type can be constructional, as in Dutch, where the polar interrogative construction typically has another constituent order than the corresponding declarative one (e.g. sliep Marie'did Mary sleep?' vs Marie sliep'Mary slept'); it could also be paradigmatic in nature, concerning possible grammatical choices. For example, in Lavukaleve, spoken in the Solomon Islands, speakers can opt for a focus or a non-focus construction in declaratives but, for yes-no questions, they can only use the focus construction (Terrill 2003: 452-453). Charting and explaining these types of (a)symmetry in the languages of the world is the overall objective of my study.