Interrogatives

4 Key excerpts on "Interrogatives"

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  A typology of questions in Northeast Asia and beyond : An ecological perspective

  • Andreas Hölzl(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Language Science Press

    (Publisher)

  Similar problems exist for other cate gories such as mass ver sus co unt. Interrogatives have what can be called schematic (e.g., Langacker 2008) meaning and they express basic semantic categories (e.g., Schulze 2007). Direct evidence for the basic meaning of Interrogatives can be found in many languages that have transparent inter-rogatives (Muysken & Smith 1990) such as English what kind of or what for . A list of frequent elements that are combined with Interrogatives can be found in Table 4.8. For example, the Trans-Himalayan language Anong has a rather general interrogative k h a 55 ~ k h a 31 that, if combined with a personal classi fer, forms the interrogative k h a 31 -io 55 ‘who’ (Sun Hongkai et al. 2009: 73-74). In Sheko (Omotic, Afroasiatic) the interrogative yírà ‘what’ can take a “motive” marker; the resulting form yír-èɶʃǹtà has acquired the meaning ‘why’ (Hellenthal 2010: 411-412). Useful but much less common alternatives for the designation of Interrogatives are epistememes (Mushin 1995) or ignoratives (Miyaoka 2012: 443-461), which both emphasize their relation to knowledge. Table 4.8: Examples for semantic connections between Interrogatives and basic nouns etc.; see Chapter 5 for many examples Category English Basic Elements person wh o man, person, one, d em, clf thing w hat thing selection wh ich (one) one, clf kind what kind of kind, sort, class activity to do what to do, to make cause why, wh at for cause, reason, d at, cvb, purp manner how w ay, fashion, manner qantity, mass how much much, few, ?amount qantity, count h ow many many, ?number place, location wh ere place, side, loc place, direction wh ither, where to direction, all place, source wh ence, where from ?source, abl time wh en time (+ loc) Figure 4.3 is a slightly revised version of Cysouw’s (2005) illustration of major path-ways of the derivation of Interrogatives, and may also be understood as a conceptual space for Interrogatives (Hölzl 2015c).

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  Language Typology and Language Universals 2.Teilband

  • Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible, Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Although the existence of interrogative constructions seems a universal property of natural languages, languages differ substan-tially in the strategies they employ for coding Interrogatives. There are seven basic strate-gies of deriving Interrogatives, some of them being restricted to particular types of inter-rogatives: (i) intonation, (ii) interrogative particles, (iii) interrogative tags, (iv) disjunc-tive constructions (v) the order of constitu-ents, (vi) verbal inflection and (vii) interroga-tive words. Some of these strategies can occur in combination, others may be mutually ex-clusive. Interrogative systems are related to many other subsystems of grammar (relative pro-nouns, indefinite pronouns, conditionals, etc.) and interrogative marking may be derived from or expand into these areas. 2. Clause types and associated speech acts There are three basic clause types to be found in the languages of the world and interroga-tives are one of them. Besides interrogative clauses, we find declarative and imperative clauses and with each of these clause types a prototypical speech act is associated. The speech act normally associated with declara-tives is that of making a statement, with in-terrogatives that of asking a question and with imperatives it is the issuing of a com-mand (directives), as the following English examples illustrate: (2) (a) She is a good student, (declarative, statement) (b) Is she a good student? (interrogative, question) (c) Be a good student! (imperative, direc-tive) As is well-known, this conventionalised rela-tionship between syntactic structure or clause type and conversational use is by no means isomorphic and in actual use declaratives and Interrogatives (not so much imperatives, though) may be associated with various other speech acts (cf. Huddleston 1994 for a good summary).

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  Contextualized French Grammar

  A Handbook

  • Stacey Bourns(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  133 Interrogatives Interrogatives When you hear the word “interrogative,” you prob-ably think of an interroga-tion: a bright light bulb or a blindfold, questions shouted repeatedly—you get the pic-ture. In comparison, French grammar may not seem so bad. The important thing to remember is that questions are your friends. You use them to get what you want or need: food, lodging, even a date. CHAPTER 8 Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 134 CHAPTER 8 Interrogatives TYPES OF QUESTIONS The first thing you need to know is that there are two main types of ques-tions in French. 8.1 What are the two types of questions that are found in French? 1. Yes-No Questions. These are the easier of the two groups, since they don’t begin with any kind of special question word and can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” You’ve already seen them quite a bit in earlier chapters. 2. Wh-Questions. Unlike yes-no questions, these begin with a ques-tion word. In English, linguists call question words, or Interrogatives, wh-expressions, because they usually begin with the letters wh: where, when, why, etc. In French, they often begin with qu: quand, qui, que, etc. The questions in this group are more complicated and elicit more information than simple yes-no questions. This chapter begins with a discussion of yes-no questions and then covers wh-questions.

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  Questions and Rhetoric in the Greek New Testament

  An Essential Reference Resource for Exegesis

  • Douglas Estes(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Zondervan Academic

    (Publisher)

  CDL 399). Therefore, our goal in studying the semantics of questions is to understand better what they mean. In a way, semantics is more challenging a field than syntax for questions, as it involves not just discovering the interrogative logic but also defining it.

  Semantics is an extremely broad field of study. Our approach to semantics is different than what is often meant by the term semantics in the study of the GNT. Usually, when the term is used, it refers to lexical semantics, or the meaning of words. Our use of the term refers to what can be called syntactical or grammatical semantics, expressed as the meaning of a grammatical construct (like a clause or a sentence). More accurately, we could call our area of interest interrogative semantics, given that we are interested in the meaning of questions (apart from other types of sentences). In all fairness to lexical semantics, grammatical semantics (in this case, interrogative semantics) is much more complex, as we are trying to discover the meaning of sentences rather than words.54 Below we consider several of the most important factors that shape the semantics of questions.

  Key Bibliography

  Cruse, Meaning, 263 – 300; Estes, Questions, 45 – 47; Higginbotham, “Semantics of Questions,” 361 – 83; Louw, Semantics; Nida and Louw, Lexical Semantics, 1 – 20; Saeed, Semantics, 3 – 19.

  1. Force

  Force, or illocutionary force as it is formally called, is a push found in utterances that is applied toward its audience. To put it another way: If we wanted to move a piece of furniture, we might apply a horizontal-forward force (slide it), a vertical-up force (lift it), or some combination of both forces (shimmy it), but we would

  never apply a vertical-down or horizontal-reverse force. To carry the furniture, a force (of some sort) is applied. In the same way, if we wanted to express exasperation to someone, we could apply an exclamative force (“What!”), an interrogative force (“What?”), or both (“What!?”), but not an agreement force (“What,” as in “I agree with you”). To carry the point of the sentence, a force (of some sort) is applied. Force comes from both syntax and semantics; it is one of those unique properties that is rooted in the nature of human communication. Force is such an important part of sentence semantics that a sentence cannot have meaning without force.55

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