Year: 2006
Type: article
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.
Source: ZAS Papers in Linguistics
Author: Sabine Zerbian
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2120109675