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

在罗马尼亚语中，陈述句和是非问句之间的区别往往仅仅是用升调说出前者，就像Maria doarme‘Mary’和Maria doarme？“玛丽在睡觉吗？”建议。同样，印尼语的Maybrat可以在任何陈述句中添加a，并将其转化为是-否疑问句(Dol 1999：199-201)。从Miestamo(2005)(A)对称性概念的角度来看--即域f(X)和X(NOT)的语言表达的不同之处只在于f()标记的出现--在这种语言中，所谓的“陈述句”和“极疑问句”之间的关系可以被描述为对称的：它们只是在韵律或语法特征上有所不同，其中一个标记为另一个的问句对应物。然而，这种关系也可以是不对称的。不对称类型可以是构式，就像荷兰语一样，极地疑问句通常有另一个语序，而不是相应的陈述语序(例如，Sliep Marie‘Do Mary Slear？)VS Marie Sliep‘Mary Sleep’)；它也可能是聚合性质的，涉及到可能的语法选择。例如，在所罗门群岛的拉武卡列夫，说话者可以选择陈述句中的焦点或非焦点结构，但对于是-否问题，他们只能使用焦点结构(Terrill 2003：452-453)。绘制和解释世界语言中的这些类型的对称性是我研究的总体目标。

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.