Questions in northern Sotho

Autor/innen

  • Sabine Zerbian

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.43.2006.294

Abstract

This article gives an overview of the marking of polar and constituent questions in Northern Sotho, a Bantu language of South Africa. It thereby provides a contribution to the typological investigation of sentence types in the world’s languages. As will be shown, Northern Sotho follows cross-linguistic tendencies in marking interrogative sentences: It uses intonation as main indicator in polar questions and question words as main indicator in constituent questions. Nevertheless, it also shows interesting language-specific variation, e.g. with respect to the location of raised intonation in polar questions, the presence of two pragmatically distinct question particles in polar questions, or a split in the formation of constituent questions based on the grammatical function of the questioned constituent.

 

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Veröffentlicht

2006

Zitationsvorschlag

Zerbian, Sabine. 2006. „Questions in Northern Sotho“. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 43 (Januar):257-80. https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.43.2006.294.