Re: Embedded Interrogatives

Jim Grossmann asked:

>Are embedded interrogative complements (e.g. I asked him WHAT HE SAW.    It
>was WHERE HE WENT that puzzles me.) common cross-linguistically?   Or would
>including them in my conlang make it a euroclone?
My personal feeling is that embedded interrogative complements are not
a strictly European feature, but I admit I haven't looked into the matter.
Kou and co.:  What do Chinese and Japanese do?

Some languages, it seems, make use of headless relative clauses where
English uses embedded interrogatives.  Malagasy does this, for example:

        ny   vehivavy  izay  hitany
        the  woman     WH    saw-3
        "the woman who he saw"

        izay  hitany
        WH    saw-3
        "(the one/thing) who/that he saw"

        Nanontany  tena  aho  izay  hitany
        asked      self  I    WH    saw-3
        "I wondered who/what he saw"

Here, "izay" is a sort of generic wh-operator, similar to "qui" or
"ce qui" in French (except that "qui" in French also means "who",
whereas "izay" is not homophonous with any of the interrogative operators).

The solution I adopted for Tokana is to have a construction whereby the
interrogative word is modified by a relative clause:

        ne   iha    hielinna
        the  woman  that-he-saw
        "the woman that he saw"

        ne   mioh  hielinna
        the  who   that-he-saw
        "(the one) who he saw"
        lit. "the who that he saw"

        Ami  nesepena   mioh  hielinna
        I    asked-him  who   that-he-saw
        "I asked him who he saw"

Since "mioh" means not only "who" but "someone", the second and third
examples could also be translated "the someone that he saw" and "I asked
him (for) someone that he saw".  Thus, the question of whether or not
Tokana has 'true' embedded interrogatives is left conveniently ambiguous,
dependent on whether you construe "mioh" in its interrogative or
indefinite usage here...

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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