[Lingtyp] affirmative particles and affirmative answers
Frans Plank
frans.plank at ling-phil.ox.ac.uk
Mon Nov 15 17:43:28 UTC 2021
Dear Ion, there was an exchange on this matter of answer particles/expressions on lingtyp years ago. Here below is what I could recover, in case this sort of thing is useful for you.
And a title you might want to consult: it’s Edith’s PhD thesis and the syntax she assumed (those were the days …) was almost as baroque as Anders Holmberg’s.
Moravcsik, Edith A. (1971). Some cross-linguistic generalizations about yes-no questions and their answers. Working Papers on Language Universals 7: 45-193.
5 Apr 2006
for light entertainment in between the colours:
Is anybody out there aware of wide-range comparative etymological work on words (well, sentences) meaning YES and NO which shows that these items are, or were, morphologically complex?
This question has come up in recent discussion (most recently at the Leipzig Rara event) of a paper by Johan van der Auwera (et al) on person-number inflection (or clitics) being extended to YES/NO, as in Dutch JAA-N-SE yes-AGR-they 'yes, they do'.
French OUI 'yes' was complex, supposedly deriving from HOC ILLE.
English YES is another one, deriving from YEA SIE 'yes, so it be'.
Or German NEIN, deriving from NOT ONE.
What are possible sources? And is such morphological complexity destined to quickly become opaque with such words/sentences?
Frans Plank
5 Apr 2006
Here are three different types of source:
Hebrew KEN and Spanish, Italian etc. SI both come from 'thus'.
For 'no' one would expect languages to have euphemisms, like Turkish HAYIR 'no', an Arabic loan whose original meaning is 'good(ness)'.
The first syllable of Turkish EVET was probably an exclamation like 'huh', while the second syllable was an emphatic particle of Iranian origin.
Marcel Erdal
5 Apr 2006
Lieber Herr Plank,
um ein wenig zum light entertainment beizusteuern: russ. "net" kommt von
"ne tu(t)" = "nicht hier" (reflektiert im umgangssprachl. "netu").
Spielt es für Sie eine Rolle, ob die Fragepartikel zugleich als
negatives Existenzialverb ('nicht sein', 'nicht geben') fungiert? Das
ist nämlich für Russ. der Fall. Vgl. z.B. lit. "ne°ra" von "ne + yra" =
"NEG + ist (3 Präs. von "bu_ti" 'sein')., welches nur als negierter
Existenzquantor verwendet wird (gegenüber "ne" = 'nein'), genauso wie
poln. "nie" (vs. "nie ma" = 'es gibt nicht').
Mi schönen Grüssen,
Björn Wiemer.
5 Apr 2006
More on complex forms of YES and NO, this time in Iranian:
In standard Persian, there are three ways of saying NO: /næ/ (Iranian), /xeyr/ (Arabic, see Marcel's note -- not very common by itself in Persian but does occur) and then the very frequent combination of both: /næ-xeyr/.
YES has a similar pattern but only dialectally:
YES in standard Persian is /bæle/, an Arabic borrowing. The original Persian was probably /ha/. In the Persian dialects of south Iran, i.e., Persian as spoken in Fars province, they commonly used the combined Persian + Arabic forms in /ha-bæle/ "yes". Thus both compound forms of NO and YES are of the type: /original Persian + borrowing/.
Don Stilo
5 Apr 2006
Hungarian Igen 'yes' is cognate with Igaz ‘true'
Denis Creissels
5 Apr 2006
Just one Finno-Ugric example: Hungarian NEM 'no'
Proto-Finno-Ugric *nä 'this'+ *mi 'what?' > 'something' > (in Early
Proto-Hungarian negative sentences) 'nothing' > 'no'.
Marianne
Marianne Bakro-Nagy
5 Apr 2006
Dear Frans,
In the languages I know best (north Vanuatu, eastern Solomons), YES and NO work as follows:
*You can find more information on these languages on my page (http://alex.francois.free.fr/), under 'Fieldwork'.
1. First thing, the lighter form that corresponds to these 'sentential signs' is usually that of an "intonational gesture" (hoping this is the right term).
[there are also facial gestures, which I won't detail here].
* YES will be a slightly elongated, though monosyllabic vowel [o] (or schwa), with a falling prosodic contour of the type 4>1*.
Taking a tonal analogy, one may transcribe this as [ô:] -- this roughly sounds the same as the fourth tone of Mandarin Chinese.
* Its negative counterpart (which may be glossed NO) takes the form of a longer [o] (or schwa), following a three-syllable pitch contour: a high plateau followed by a low one and then a final rise: something like 4+1+3.
Taking a tonal analogy, one may roughly transcribe this as [ó.ò.ó].
*I'm using here a classical, though intuitive scale from 1 = extra-low to 5 = extra-high. Note that none of these languages is tonal.
2. There is a second, heavier equivalent to our NO, which takes a segmental / lexical form.
[NB: The phenomenon is much less observable for YES. In the affirmative, the sentence is generally repeated, as in Did you go there? -- Mmm! I went there.]
In all the languages of the area, this form 'No' is the same form as the negative existential predicate (henceforth NegExist) -- Engl. 'There isn't [+Noun]' (or if the subject is anaphoric, 'There's none'.)
Thus compare, for a language called Lemerig (3 speakers, Vanua Lava):
N-pé niv. ~ Niv pé.
Art-water NegExist. NegExist water
'There is no water.'
N-pé pän? -- Óòó, (n-pé) niv.
Art-water Exist (no) (Art-water) NegExist
'Is there any water? -- No, there isn't any.'
Näk m-van 'i lé wongon? -- Óòó, niv.
2sg Preter1-go Pret2 Locative beach (no) NegExist
'Did you go to the beach? -- No, I didn't.'
Note the perfect parallels in Bislama (the English-lexifier pidgin of Vanuatu), with Nogat [<Eng. no + got 'have not']:
Wora i nogat. ~ (I) nogat wora.
water Pred NegExist. Pred NegExist water
'There is no water.'
Wora i gat? -- Óòó, (wora) i nogat.
water Pred Exist (no) (water) Pred NegExist
'Is there any water? -- No, there isn't any.'
Yu bin go long sanbij? -- Óòó, (*i) nogat.
2sg Preter go Locative beach (no) (*Pred) NegExist
'Did you go to the beach? -- No, I didn't.'
In Solomon Pijin, the form is Nomoa [<Eng. no + more 'not any more'].
Almost all of the 20 Oceanic languages on which I have first-hand data behave the same. In a way, they illustrate your query, since they have a NO form that has its own meaning and syntax, apart from being a sentential word.
However, in almost all these languages, you can't really say that the NO word is morphologically complex, since it consists essentially of a single morpheme (glossed here NegExist): e.g. Teanu tae, Tanema eia, Hiw tego, Mwotlap tateh, Lemerig niv, Vurës odiang, Vera'a gitag, Mwesen eneng, Nume/Dorig/Koro bek, Mwerlap tégé…
Yet in two languages, Olrat and Lakon, the word is morphologically analysable as prefixed with a Stative aspect: ga iv /Stative/NegExist/.
3. More interestingly, two languages show a morphologically complex form for 'No':
* In Lo-Toga, 'No' is tate-gë, analysable as /tate/ 'NegExist' + /gë/ 'thing' = 'there is nothing'.
* In Araki, 'No = NegExist' is mo ce re, analysable as /mo/ '3rd.pers. Realis' + /ce/ 'Negation' + /re/ 'Partitive' = 'not any'.
[NB: for Araki, see p.65 of my Grammar:
François, Alexandre. 2002. Araki: A disappearing language of Vanuatu.Pacific Linguistics, 522. Canberra: Australian National University. 375 pp.]
________________________________
This is probably too detailed for what you were after.
But some of the information may be helpful to you?
Best regards,
Alex FRANÇOIS.
5 Apr 2006
Hi everybody
Russian "da" seems to be non-derived, while Russian "net" is historically complex, derived from "not is here" (at least according to Vasmer, who seems to follow the tradition); the latter etymology is completely opaque to the speakers, synchronically.
Bagvalal (Andian, Nakh-Daghestanian) uses negative copula for 'no' and ananalyzable (at least synchronically) one phoneme word for 'yes' (and some words also having other usages, as 'then').
Archi (Lezgic, Nakh-Daghestanian) uses negative copula for 'no', too.
In the Caucasus what apparently is a non-phonological click is also commonly used for 'no'.
Michael Daniel
5 Apr 2006
Is anybody out there aware of wide-range comparative etymological work on
words (well, sentences) meaning YES and NO which shows that these items
are, or were, morphologically complex?
No way :-)!
Larry [Hyman]
5 Apr 2006
There is a paper about the typology of "yes" and "no" in the Journal of
Linguistics Anthropology of arond 5 years back. Not so much about te etymology, if I remember well, but more about the form of the words - recurrent phonemes across languages. It had a complicated title with a neologism in it. It may provide information about Frans’ question as well.
Peter [Bakker]
6 Apr 2006
Michael Daniel wrote:
"In the Caucasus what apparently is a non-phonological click is also
commonly used for 'no'."
This is probably Ottoman in origin, as it is used in Greek, Turkish and Levantine dialects of Arabic. In none of those languages, however, is it the only way of saying "no"; it is thus more akin to English "hunh-unh" for "no".
Steve Hewitt
6 Apr 2006
Some more points.
1. One small comment from a colleague, Timur Maisak - negative clicks are different, the click is lateral in Bagvalal (and likely in some other Avar-Andian langauges?), while apical in Agul (and likely in some other Lezgic languages). This may actually correlate with the phonological structure of the language - Bagvalal has a rich set of laterals while it is not so in Agul.
2. Stephen Hewitt just made a remark that made me re-thinking the original query by Frans.
It is true that both Archi and Bagvalal, and probably other Nakh-Daghestanian, have a "grammatical" and "phonologically behaving" ways of sayin 'no' (in the case of Archi and Bagvalal this is the negative copula). Thus, non-phonological clicks are indeed something like huh-uh (hunh-unh?) in English. However, they are probably used wider; at least the Russian interjection parallel to the English one both phonetically (something like a sequence of two glottal stops) and functionally seems more limited. Which makes me to speculate a bit further.
Maybe, negative copulas, although used in this functions, are a bit too grammatical to be the main negative reaction reply in these languages (as if we would claim that "it isn't" is one of the English 'no's)? In other words, roughly speaking, is it not the case that languages tend to have an unanalyzable 'no'?
Which, historically, would support Frans's idea that languages tend to make ways of saying 'no's opaque as quick as possible.
Michael Daniel
6 Apr 2006
Dear Frans,
Maybe, the following quote from L.R. Trask, The History of Basque
(Routledge, 1997, p. 209) on the word 'yes' in Basque is of interest to you
(italics suppressed, emphasis by means of capitals added by SE):
"The word bai 'yes' is doubtless related to the affirmative morph ba-, as
in badator 'he/she's coming', formerly 'he/she IS coming'; bai may well be
an ancient verb-form, along the lines of 'it is so', possibly involving the
root -di- of the archaic verb *edin."
Best,
Stig [Eliasson]
6 Apr 2006
(sorry this is going to be a bit long)
Dear all,
Let me mention here the situation in a few Oceanic languages from north Vanuatu & eastern Solomons.
[See my page http://alex.francois.free.fr/AF-field.htm for a list and a map of these languages]
YES and NO work as follows.
Basically, we get a twofold strategy similar to that mentioned for Caucasus languages by Michael Daniel and Stephen Hewitt: that is, the equivalent of YES and NO take both the form of a "vocal gesture" (if this is the right term) and of lexical material [see below]. There are also facial gestures, which I won't describe here, but which of course are worth of mention.
* In the affirmative, you generally combine the gesture with the sentence repeated,
something like Did you go there? -- Mmm! I went there. In this case, I guess we would say that the equivalent of YES is the vocal gesture (although this may be discussed).
* Things are less clearcut for NO, since we get both the gesture and a specific single-word sentence used for negative statements. Both strategies (gestural and lexical) are used in similar contexts for similar purposes [though there are slight pragmatic nuances, which I won't detail here].
When they are combined, which is often the case, the gestural NO comes first and the lexical second: see in the Lemerig example below “Óòó, niv!”. Incidentally, it would be interesting to check if this is always the case in other languages (gestural NO comes before lexical NO).
We may compare this twofold NO-sentence with a sequence “Unhun, no!” in English, thus suggesting that the equivalent to NO is really /niv/; but we might as well point to the English sequence “No, I didn't” -- thus suggesting /Óòó/ = NO and /niv/ = “I didn't” (and I agree with Michael that the latter construction can be regarded as one of English 'NO's).
Unless we come up with a stricter definition of what should be understood as "equivalents to YES and NO", I see no strong reason for deciding which one is the exact equivalent of English NO. So let's consider for the moment that both /Óòó/ and /niv/ equally constitute equivalents to NO, as they both can form (whether separately or combined) a well-formed utterance showing the speaker's disagreement with the content of a preceding question / claim / presupposed proposition, etc.
________________________________
Now, if we get back to the Oceanic forms:
1. The vocal gesture normally takes the form of a vowel with a specific pitch contour. [no clicks].
The vowel is /o/ in 17 languages, and schwa in the two languages (Lo-Toga and Hiw) that possess schwa in their vowel inventory.
* YES will be a slightly elongated, though monosyllabic vowel, with a falling prosodic contour of the type 4>1* -- this roughly sounds the same as the fourth tone of Mandarin Chinese.
Taking a tonal analogy, one may transcribe this as [ô:].
(*I'm using here intuitively a scale from 1 = extra-low to 5 = extra-high. Note that none of these languages is tonal.)
* Its negative counterpart takes the form of a longer vowel, following a three-syllable pitch contour: a high plateau followed by a low one and then a final rise: something like 4+1+3.
Taking a tonal analogy, one may roughly transcribe this as [ó.ò.ó]. In the examples below, It will appear as /Óòó/.
2. As for the lexical equivalent to our NO:
In all the languages of the area, the lexical form 'No' is the same form as the negative existential predicate (henceforth NegExist) -- Engl. 'There isn't [+Noun]' (or if the subject is anaphoric, 'There's none'.)
Thus compare, for a language called Lemerig (3 speakers, Vanua Lava):
N-pé niv. ~ Niv pé.
Art-water NegExist. NegExist water
'There is no water.'
N-pé pän? -- Óòó, (n-pé) niv.
Art-water Exist (no) (Art-water) NegExist
'Is there any water? -- No, there isn't any.'
Näk m-van 'i lé wongon? -- Óòó, niv.
2sg Preter1-go Pret2 Locative beach (no) NegExist
'Did you go to the beach? -- No, I didn't.'
Note the perfect parallels in Bislama (the English-lexifier pidgin of Vanuatu), with Nogat [<Eng. no + got 'have not']:
Wora i nogat. ~ (I) nogat wora.
water Pred NegExist. Pred NegExist water
'There is no water.'
Wora i gat? -- Óòó, (wora) i nogat.
water Pred Exist (no) (water) Pred NegExist
'Is there any water? -- No, there isn't any.'
Yu bin go long sanbij? -- Óòó, (*i) nogat.
2sg Preter go Locative beach (no) (*Pred) NegExist
'Did you go to the beach? -- No, I didn't.'
In Solomon Pijin, the form is Nomoa [<Eng. no + more 'not any more'].
Almost all of the Oceanic languages on which I have first-hand data behave the same. In a way, they illustrate your query, since they have a NO form that has its own meaning and syntax, apart from being a sentential word.
However, in almost all these languages, you can't really say that the NO word is morphologically complex, since it consists essentially of a single morpheme (glossed here NegExist): e.g. Teanu tae, Tanema eia, Hiw tego, Mwotlap tateh, Lemerig niv, Vurës odiang, Vera'a gitag, Mwesen eneng, Mota tagai, Nume/Dorig/Koro bek, Mwerlap tégé…
In two languages, Olrat and Lakon, the word is morphologically analysable as prefixed with a Stative aspect: ga iv /Stative/NegExist/.
3. More interestingly, two languages (other than Bislama and Pijin mentioned earlier) show a morphologically complex form for 'No':
* In Araki, 'No = NegExist' is mo ce re, analysable as /mo/ '3rd.pers. Realis' + /ce/ 'Negation' + /re/ 'Partitive' = 'not any'.
[see p.65 of: François, Alexandre. 2002. Araki: A disappearing language of Vanuatu. Pacific Linguistics, 522. Canberra: Australian National University.]
* In Lo-Toga, 'No' is tate-gë, analysable as /tate/ 'NegExist' + /gë/ 'thing' = 'there is nothing'.
________________________________
Best regards,
Alex.
6 Apr 2006
Dear all,
here a little bit of brain storming, nothing more. Alex' wonderful presentation of the Oceanic data as well as Michael's remarks on East Caucasian remind me of a talk Theo Vennemann (Munich) once gave at our University. He talked abot the yes/no patterns in Europe dwelling upon the question whether the distribution of languages with yes/no-'words' (e.g. German) and those with positive/negative sentential echoes ('(s)he did/n't, it is/n't etc. with many variants) (e.g. Celtic with impacts on Old English etc.) is more than just coincidental. I do not want to go into the details here, but Theo's talk has raised the question whether a) yes/no-strategies are a universal of language at all, whether b) the lexicalization of yes/no-words has common pathways in the languages of the world. Naturally, the discussion did not come to any defnite conclusion, still it made me thinking of the following:
For methodological reasons, we should clearly distinguish between what Alex has called vocal gestures and yes/no-words or yes/no-constructions. Vocal gestures seem to be sound symbolic in nature, and it would be highly interesting to collect a larger typological sample of vocal yes/no-gestures to see whether they share common features (both for their semantics and their 'form'). For instance, I do not think that it is just coincidental that in Alex examples, [ô] has a falling contour tone (> 'yes'), whereas [óòó] ends with a final rise (> 'no'). This correlates with the general observation that a falling prosodic pattern is frequently associated with the expression of certainty, whereas a final rising pattern indicates uncertainty etc. (compare German [jà] 'yes' (certain) vs. [já] 'is it really so? I doubt / am amazed, wonder' (uncertain). The natural outcome of 'uncertainty' in a communicative situation seems to be some kind of (graded) 'negation' (e.g. S1: I will go! S2: Do you? (I don't think so) > 'no') [by the way, this observation correponds to the well-known relationship between negation and interrogation]. This way, a vocal gesture indicatiing 'no' can at least in parts be derived from its 'positive' counterpart. On the other hand, the expression of 'no' does not seem to be an obligatory technique to negate the utterance of a speaker. We can also do without, compare: S1: I will go to the market. S2: You stay here! Here, negation emerges from the use of more or less antonymic expressions. A vocal gesture may then support and strengthen this antonymic expression, leading to some kind of negative assertion. Interestingliy enough, such vocal gestures seem to have their own formal patterns, as can be seen for instance from the paralinguistic usage of clicks (see WALS, map 142). For instance, some German speakers know the use of the dento-alveolar click in the sense of 'no' only if it is reduplicated, whereas it expresses amazement when spoken out more than two times. Likewise in German, we have the combination ['m-'m] (' = glottal stop with nasalization) to indicate 'no', but the simple form ['m] does not work at all. The same holds for German ['ä/n-'ä/n] (/n = slight nazalization). I am left with the impression that vocal gestures have their proper patterns which may be both universal and particularized in nature.
I do not know whether the same holds for vocal gestures expressing 'yes'. In German, we have a form ['`m´m`m] ('m with high-low-high) which indicates some kind of 'yes' (and which clearly goes against what I have said above for the opposition [ô] vs. [óòó]), but that's another issue). Else, we sometimes see the combination of a laryngeal + vowel (often a back vowel), e.g. [ho] in Udi (East Caucasian) or Georgian. There are -as far as I can see - no such constraints on simple vs. reduplicated etc.
The lexical expression of yes/no may have sometimes evolved from vocal gestures, though I do not know of any language that has for instance lexicalized (and grammaticalized) the type of paralinguistic clicks mentioned above. Interestingly enough, yes-words seem to be much more transparent as for their etymology than no-words. This holds especially if the yes-word does not stem from a vocal gesture. Sources may be for instance modal deictic terms ('so', 'thus' etc.), terms related to 'truth'-concepts and so on. No-words are often taken from or derived from a verbal negator, which makes me think that many no-words reflect older echoe-techniques mentioned above. But then we arrive at the question, where verbal negators stem from. In a number of languages, we can reconstruct a verbal negator for the protolanguage (e.g. IE *ne, Southern East Caucasian *t:e etc.) which illustrates that verbal negators often are rather old in form (contrary to yes/no-words, which are frequently borrowings). But it is difficult to relate such a reconstructed negator to another meaning (thus claiming that such a negator has come about via metonymy, metaphorization or the like). One option would be interrogative words/morphemes (e.g. is Turkish -mI- (negation and mI = interrogation just coincidental?), see above for this assumption (I know that people usually derive certain interrogative markers from a negative construction, but must it be alwas this way?).
Best
Wolfgang [Schulze]
6 Apr 2006
A question that has always interested me about 'yes'
and 'no' is how they are reported. In English it's
straightforward: you say 'he said no' or 'they said
yes'. In French the yes/no word is introduced by a
complementizer ('il a dit que oui), more specifically
by a complementizer otherwise reserved for finite
constructions, whereas in Italian the connecting word
is 'di' which is either the complementizer for
infinitival clauses or an item which introduces a
nominal (cf 'più intelligente di Giorgio' = 'more
intelligent than George'): thus 'ha detto di no' = 'he
said no'. But what about when the yes/no word is what
people have been calling a 'vocal gesture'? In English
reports of non-linguistic sounds are introduced by
'go' not 'say': thus "he went 'uh-uh'" not *he said
'uh-uh'. However, even if someone made a vocal
gesture, I think it would be reasonable to report it
as 'he said yes' meaning simply 'he gave his consent'.
But in English you can't say *'I believe yes/no'
whereas in Italian you can say 'credo di sì/no'.
How does reporting 'yes/no' words work in other
languages?
Nigel [Vincent]
7 Apr 2006
In Czech there are several ways of reporting yes/no utterances.
Note
* "yes" = ANO, colloquial JO (< German), NO (which seems to trouble Spanish visitors to Czechia for some reason)
* "no" = NE, dialectal NE'E, bookish NIKOLI
First of all, there is a difference between clauses with a complementiser (the factual complementiser ZE) and those without any; I'm omitting diacritics in the examples:
1a. REKLA, ZE ANO "she said yes"
1b. REKLA, ZE NE "she said no"
2a. REKLA ANO "she said “yes”"
2b. REKLA NE "she said “no”"
I think the traditional distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ speech captures the difference between (1) and (2) quite well. Option (1) is the regular way of reporting a yes/no utterance, while the absence of the complementiser in (2) appears to invoke a greater immediacy of the reported event. It’s also used in contexts when the speaker puts a ‘metalinguistic focus’ on the reported utterance: one would use it when, for example, paralinguistic features of someone’s yes/no utterance are imitated, or when reporting an institutionalised yes/no utterance, such as the “yes” (“I do”) of a wedding ceremony (2a’). Here there is even a neuter agreement of the possessive reflexive with the “yes” word, giving it a status of a ‘metalinguistic’ noun.
2a’. REKLA MU SVE ANO [she.said to.him REFL.POSS.NEU yes]
With cognition matrix predicates such as “think” or “believe” only option (1) is available. There are no complications of the English type (I THINK SO/NOT), so Czech is like Italian in this respect.
A third way to report a yes/no utterance is of course through a lexical verb such as “agree” (3), which however can also be used to report on a more elaborate event involving agreement or disagreement.
3a. SOUHLASILA “she agreed”
3b. NESOUHLASILA “she didn’t agree”
Option (3), in addition to (1) but not (2), can be used when reporting a vocal yes/no gesture. A more explicit report on a vocal yes/no gesture would contain the verbs “say” or “do, make” (never “go”), no complementiser, and the vocal gesture itself (4). The lack of the complementiser here is shared with the ‘direct’/’metalinguistic’ option (2).
4. REKLA/UDELALA (vocal.gesture) “she said/did (vocal.gesture)”
Viktor [Elsik]
8 Apr 2006
In Hungarian, there are two ways to report somebody's affirming or negating something.
1/ "He said yes-ACC.
"He said no-ACC."
2/ "He said that yes-
NOM."
"He said that no-NOM."
Unlike English and like German, Hungarian does not routinely use sentential echoes (such as English "Yes, he did so.") although the construction is possible; e.g. "Yes, he acted in this way."
Best - Edith Moravcsik
16 Apr 2006
Dear Frans,
Just back from 2 weeks (teaching) in Santiago de Compostela. I set a master's student on something like this topic ... Results are due a year from now
Johan
[Still waiting. Frans]
23 Aug 2006
Last April, there was an extended discussion on LINGTYP about the kinds of answers to yes-no questions that different languages use.
It would be interesting to see how the types of answers relate to the types of tags in tag questions. There appears to be some correlation. Thus, in English, a simple "yes" or "no" is not a "full answer" to a yes-no question, nor do they serve as tags - at least not in the standard varieties. Ex:
Have you eaten dinner?
No, I haven't.
?No.
You have eaten dinner, haven't you?
?You have eaten dinner, no?
In Hungarian on the other hand, simple 'yes' or 'no' serves as an answer; 'no' can also be a tag but 'yes' cannot.
Edith
24 Aug 2006
Dear Edith,
Theo Vennemann once (2002) gave a lecture in Munich on the problem you have mentioned. He discussed the typology of yes/no-answers especially with respect to the distribution of patterns in Europa hypothesizing that a Celtic substrat has motivated e.g. the English type of echo answers that again would have caused the the echoing tag type. To better account for the details from a typological perspective, it would make sense to 'classify' the different tag types and see a) whether their internal structure is matched in echo answers and b) whether a certain type of tags necesserily calls for a specific answer type. Personally, I would start from a template similar to the following (surely not comprehensive):
Question Answer
Tag Without 1. yes/no
2. echo
2.1 Based on dummy verbs (light verbs), eg. 'do, have' etc.
2.2 Based on the echoing of the full verb
Tag Present
1. yes/no
2. only yes
3. only not
4. internal echo
4.1 Based on dummy verbs (light verbs) e.g. 'do, have' etc.
4.2 Based on the echoing of the full verb
The question internal tags should further be classified according to the question wether it is negate a positive assumption / asserts a negative assumption (> contradiction), or whether it matches the polarity. In addition, it might be crucial to observe which constituents are copied into a tag-like answer (as well into the tag itself). In English, we clearly see an accusative startegy, copying S and A into the answer (plus dummy verb), but 'fading out' O (nad IO etc.). In ergative strategies, the oppostite may occasionally be true.
Best wishes,
Wolfgang
24 Aug 2006
A follow-up to Wolfgang's posting. By chance I had an email from Theo a few days ago. He is giving the latest version of his yes/no paper at the ICEHL conference in Bergamo tomorrow. Abstract available at: www.unibg.it/14icehl<http://www.unibg.it/14icehl>
Nigel
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