Re: interrogative tail or head ?

(sorry, should have been sent to the whole list)

En réponse à claudio <claudio.soboll@...>:

>
> head-interrogation or tail-interrogation? what is more natural ?
>
As you said, Chinese (but also Japanese with the particle ka) mark questions
through final particles. When it's yes/no questions, this marker is the only
one
to mark questions (along with the raising of intonation). When it's another
kind
of questions, the marker is accompanied with interrogative words (like in
Japanese dare: who, doko: where, itsu: when, naze: why, etc...) which stay in
their natural place in the sentence (they are not fronted like in Indo-European
languages). So these languages seem to like tail-interrogation.

On the other hand, if you look at Latin, it had an interrogation marker for
yes/no questions: num, which had to be placed first in the question. It could
also ask questions about specific things with the suffix -ne, but usually the
word bearing the suffix had to be fronted. Finally it also had interrogative
pronouns, adjectives and adverbs that were always first in the sentence. I
think
Polish also has a marker for yes/no questions that appears in front of those
sentences (like the Esperanto cxu, for that matter). Also, Spoken French has
evolved a marker for yes/no questions: "est-ce que" which is always first in
the
sentence. Finally, English, French, German, and most of the European languages
front their interrogative words (who, qui, wer, où, when, wo, etc...). All this
shows a preference for head-interrogation. Still, those languages all have this
raising intonation so characteristic of questions, which shows that still the
tail is a nice place for the interrogation.

So what's going on? I think there are various processes at work there:

1. A sentence has usually two particular spots: its beginning and its end.
Things that need to be highlighted (topic, focus, and so interrogative marks)
are usually moved to one place or another, the beginning of the sentence being
the most important one. This is quite in agreement with the observations I told
you.

2. When you get the attention of someone, it takes usually a few seconds to the
person to realize that you were talking to him/her, and usually this person has
missed the first word(s) you said. This means that the front place of a
sentence
is quite likely to be skipped by a not attentive listener, and thus, when you
ask a question, you want the person to understand at once that it was a
question
and thus the final place of the sentence becomes more important. Thus the
reason
for the raising intonation and the final particles of Eastern languages. It
would also explain why Spoken French uses such a long phrase "est-ce que" to
introduce a question: by its length, even if it is skipped away by the
listener,
he won't have lost the main part of the question, and will be reminded that it
was a question through the raising intonation. thus such a long introductory
phrase would be there to optimize the flow of information.

As you see, those two principles are contradictory, which explains why some
languages focus on the head for questions, whiles others focus on the tail.
Still, the presence of this intonation pattern, and things like the French
introductory phrase for sentences let me think that the second process is more
important, and explains why even in languages that introduce their questions
with something at its beginning, the end is always marked in a way or another,
even if it's only by intonation.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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