Polar question particles: Hindi-Urdu kya:
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Polar question particles: Hindi-Urdu kya: Rajesh Bhatt1 · Veneeta Dayal2
Received: 1 June 2018 / Accepted: 13 January 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract We distinguish between two types of interrogative particles, (regular) question particles and polar question particles. The first, canonically exemplified by Japanese -ka, occurs in all interrogatives, in matrix as well as embedded contexts. The second, the object of the present study, is exemplified by the Hindi-Urdu particle kya:. Polar kya: occurs in polar questions but not in wh questions, and it occurs optionally in matrix questions but only in a restricted way in embedded questions. We analyze this particle as presupposing that its prejacent denotes a singleton propositional set and as partitioning the questioned proposition into two parts that can be characterized as at-issue and not at-issue. These two aspects of its meaning are shown to capture several facets of the behavior of the polar question particle kya: that have not previously been analyzed or even systematically described. The paper also touches upon well-known phenomena, such as interrogative selection and alternative questions, but from a new perspective and opens up a way of looking at interrogative particles in other languages that do not seem to neatly fit the mold of regular question particles. Keywords Prosody · Alternative questions · Polar questions · Disjunction · Scope of disjunction · Q-morphemes · Polar question particles (PQP) · Discourse particles · Selection
B R. Bhatt
[email protected] V. Dayal [email protected]
1
UMass Amherst, Amherst, USA
2
Yale University, New Haven, USA
R. Bhatt, V. Dayal
1 Introduction This paper has two inter-related foci, one specific to Hindi-Urdu1 and the other more general. Its empirical focus is a particular lexical item in Hindi-Urdu that we refer to as polar kya:. We identify various syntactic restrictions on its occurrence and provide a descriptively adequate account of those restrictions. Its theoretical contribution is to leverage the account of polar kya: to draw a distinction between two types of interrogative particles that have often been grouped together. One type of interrogative particle is the one typically referred to as a Q-morpheme. We take this to be the overt realization of C[+Q]. The other we call a polar question particle (PQP), which occurs only in a subset of clause-types marked C[+Q]. The first class is well-established in the literature, with Japanese -ka and -no as prototypical examples. The second class is exemplified by Hindi-Urdu polar kya:, the new kid on the block. We begin by introducing the signature properties of the Hindi-Urdu polar question particle in Sect. 2: its restriction to polar questions, its flexible syntactic positioning, and its selectiveness in appearing inside embedded polar questions. In Sect. 3, we present diagnostics distinguishing polar question particles from a clause-typing Qmorpheme. We analyze the Hindi-Urdu PQP kya: as having a presupposition that targets polar quest
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