Re: Focus, interrogatives

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
> At 15:17 31/05/99 -0700, you wrote:
>
> [snip of very interesting stuff]
>
> >
> >In the meantime... do I front or not front the interrogative in an
> >OSV/SOV
> >language?
> >
>
>         Why not just leave the interrogative in place, that's to say where the
> answer should be? I don't have any statistics but it seems that fronting
> the interrogative is mainly an Indo-European feature. Japanese (SOV) does
> very well without it.
>
>         BTW, in an interrogative sentence, what is an interrogative? Focus
> (strange, it doesn't give any new information, it asks for one)? Topic
> (also strange, it's not the thing we're talking about)? Because if you can
> determine that, the place of the interrogative will be easier to choose.
That's precisely what I'm trying to figure out.  It isn't either focus
or
comment... what it asks is focussed, which is why I fronted that and not
it
in my first example.  If I front the interrogative, then Teonaht
dictates
that the focus (or is it topic or comment?) of the question be put in a
relative clause.  Because the interrogative HAS to come in front of the
verb.  The other complicating factors are that some interrogatives
require
either an object or a subject answer:

                Who is that man?  He is..
                Whom did you see?  Him I saw...

But:  why did you do it?  Answer requires a sentence
      where did you go?  Answer requires a locative
      When did you do it?  Answer requires some temporal reference
      How did you do it?  Answer requires .... and so on.

        How did you kill your husband's mistress with the candlestick in the
                billiards room?

        How to put that into Teonaht?  It seems easier to put the interrogative
        first in a copula construction and put the rest in a relative clause
        (and still consistent with Teonaht structure):

        (by) what INT method is (it that) killed you your husband's mistress
etc.

        RATHER than:

        Your husband's mistress with the candlestick in the billiard's room
        (by) what method INT you did kill?   bleah!

Has anybody noticed that the section on pronouns in my pages has been
incomplete
for months?  It's because even though I've made a paper grammar
including
all the interrogative pronouns, I have come to question how it is I'm
using them.



Sally
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/pronouns.html