General overview .1 General introduction.1 General introduction

Polar interrogatives are sentences that are typically used to ask yes/no questions, i.e., questions that can be answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Cross-linguistically, there is much variation concerning the marking involved in polar interrogatives. Many, but not all languages use a special intonational contour (mainly rising final into-nation), an initial or final question particle, special verb morphology, or a change in word order (Sadock & Zwicky 1985: 181–182; Dryer 2013).

In the following, I will exemplarily discuss two strategies for expressing inter-rogative sentences in spoken languages and how they were analyzed. First, I will outline polar question formation in English and then discuss the same sentence

type in the Gungbe language Gbe. Although the strategies used in both languages are superficially very dissimilar, both languages were analyzed as involving an interrogative feature in the left periphery.

3.6.1.2 Polar interrogatives in English

In English, we find intonational marking as well as a change in word order. To be more precise, we find a rising intonation and subject-auxiliary inversion. This is shown in (57).

(57) a. Daniel will visit his neighbor. Declarative

b. Will Daniel visit his neighbor? Polar interrogative English declaratives exhibit the order subject–auxiliary–verb, as illustrated in (57a). In polar interrogatives (57b), the auxiliarywillraises into a higher position than the subjectDaniel. The same pattern is found in examples without auxil-iaries. To do this, English makes use ofdo-support, as illustrated in (58).

(58) a. Daniel visits his neighbor. Declarative

b. Does Daniel visit his neighbor? Polar interrogative Standard analyses of English polar interrogatives assume that the purpose of the insertion (or the movement) of the auxiliary into a higher position is feature checking. Roberts (1993), for example, assumes that the CP hosts a null question operator in English that triggers this kind of movement. Evidence for this comes, for example, from the fact that when an overt complementizer introducing a po-lar interrogative is present, as is the case in embedded questions, verb movement is blocked. This is illustrated in (59).

(59) a. *Bill asks whether Maria will come.

b. *Bill asks whether will Maria come.

Assuming thatwhether is located in C°, we can assume that the auxiliary moves into exactly this position as it is not possible for the auxiliary to be hosted there when the position is taken by complementizers likewhether orif.

The general assumption is that C° inherits a question feature or a question operator[Q]that triggers subject-auxiliary inversion in root questions and that in embedded questions this feature is associated with a complementizer. For some researchers, most prominently Cheng (1997), the movement of the auxiliary into C° is the crucial operation in clause-typing.

3.6.1.3 Polar interrogatives in Gbe

In general, however, it should be stated that the processes underlying polar in-terrogatives are not well understood – at least from a cross-linguistic perspec-tive. This becomes obvious from the fact that there are many different mecha-nisms in the languages of the world that starkly differ from English (in fact, the subject-auxiliary inversion employed in English seems to be cross-linguistically a non-standard mechanism for marking polar questions, see Ultan 1978). One such example are languages with clause-final question particles or languages with clause-final tonal question markers.

An example of the latter case is the Gbe language Gungbe spoken in Benin.

In this language, the difference between a declarative and a polar interrogative is marked by a clause-final floating low tone as illustrated by the minimal pair from Aboh & Pfau (2010: 93).¹⁴

(60) Gunbe

‘Has Seto arrived yet?’ Polar question

The difference between a Gungbe declarative and a Gungbe polar interrogative is, as the examples illustrate, the floating low tone only present in polar interrog-atives (in the example, onwâ). In embedded polar questions both the floating low tone and an interrogative complementizer (an equivalent of Englishwhether) are present, as shown in the minimal pair in (61), again from Aboh & Pfau (2010: 93).

(61) Gungbe

‘I heard that Seto has already arrived.’ Embedded declarative b. Ùn

‘I asked if Seto has already arrived.’ Embedded polar question

14Tonal contours are indicated by accents. An acute (e.g.á) represents a high tone, a grave (e.g.

à) a low tone, and a circumflex (e.g.â) a high-low sequence.

Other Gbe languages exhibit clause-final question particles and other structurally high categories, such as encoding the speaker’s point of view, are also realized as clause-final heads (Lefebvre 2006: 211–213). Following Kayne’s (1994) idea that heads always precede their complements, Aboh (2004b) and Aboh (2004a) argue that the interrogative feature, labeled[+interrogative]here, located in the head of a (left-headed) interrogative phrase (IntP) attracts the whole proposition in a Gungbe polar interrogative into its specifier. This is illustrated, in a slightly simplified version, in the tree in (62).

(62) ForceP

SpecForceP Force

Force° InterP

SpecInterP Sɛ́tɔ̀ kò wâ?

Inter Inter°

[+interrogative]

TopP

SpecTopP Top

Topic° FocP

SpecFocP Foc

Foc° IP

t

The tree shows a derivation of the simple polar question in (60b) – for a better orientation, I included the force, the topic and the focus projection. Evidence that such a phrasal movement analysis is plausible comes from topic and focus marking (and the fact that complementizers dominate embedded questions in the expected way (61), where the complementizer would be located in the Force°

in the tree). Aboh (2004a) shows that Gungbe has overt topic and focus mark-ers which have to appear in a fixed order. Additionally, the topic and the focus markers appear in the expected clause-initial positions. An illustrative example of a topic and focus marker in an embedded clause is shown in (63).

(63) Gungbe (Aboh 2004a: 168)

‘I said that, as for the meat Asiba should cook it for Kofi.’

The example in (63) shows that Gungbe has a topic and a focus marker in the left periphery that we can assume to be the heads of the corresponding projec-tions. As predicted by Rizzi’s (1997) split-CP model, the order of these particles strictly has to beyà–wɛ́, while the opposite order, *wɛ́–yàis ungrammatical (i.e., the topic marker has to precede the focus marker). Interestingly, when a Gungbe interrogative sentence is embedded, the embedded sentence is sandwiched be-tween the complementizer and the interrogative particle. However, in the case of an embedded polar interrogative, the topic and the focus marker are reversed, as shown in (64), and occur in a clause-final position.

(64) Gungbe (Aboh 2004a: 184) Ùn

‘I asked whether Kofi should buy a car[as planned/mentioned].’

As can be seen from (64), the embedded clause is sandwiched in between the complementizer in Force° and the topic, focus, and interrogative marker. This order is derived by moving the chunk to be focused (the translational equivalent ofKofi should buy a car) into the specifier of the focus projection. Then the whole focus projection, together with the focus particle, is moved into the specifier of the topic position. Finally, the TopP is, together with the topic particle, moved into the specifier of the IntP (Aboh 2004a: 184). This not only derives the correct order, but supports the idea that Gungbe makes massive use of phrasal movement into specifier positions.

Taken together, the discussion of English and Gungbe has shown that lan-guages may make use of very different strategies to express polar interrogative sentence. However, despite their surface differences, the data can be accounted for by assuming that an interrogative head exists in the CP system that needs to be checked in some way.

3.6.2 Polar interrogatives in sign languages