The diachrony of question particles

在世界语言中标记疑问句的一个常见策略是使用疑问/疑问词。 这些疑问助词通常被认为是将一个特定的从句打成疑问句。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）的更详细的调查表明，情况更为复杂，疑问词用于表达某种类型的语用标记疑问。这些特殊的语用功能很难确定，迄今为止还没有对其确切功能及其与其历时渊源的详细比较研究。本项目旨在通过双管齐下的策略来填补这一空白：一方面，基于语料库对少数语言（最突出的是汉语和早期日耳曼语言）中疑问词的历时性进行深入调查，另一方面，对世界语言样本进行类型学调查。本文的目的是对疑问词的同形异义/一词多义的已证实的和可能的模式以及产生这些模式的语法途径进行归纳。

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.