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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2> <FONT size=3>To come back to Frans's
questions (15 Febr.) about interrogative (pro-)verbs, </FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> 1) If not
widespread throughout the world, they are by no means infrequent. To the
examples already mentioned, and coming from such diverse "families" as African,
Australian or Austronesian, I would add one more Austronesian language, and also
many Amerindian languages. The Austronesian language is Palauan, which has an
interrogative pro-verb mekera "to (do) what" (Hagège, La langue palau, Une
curiosité typologique, München, Wilhelm Fink, 1986, 46). From among the many
Amerindian languages in which interrogative pro-verbs are found, let me mention
only Sliammon Comox (Salishan, British Columbia), in which we have sentences
like </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>tetm-cep (doingwhat-youPL) "what are you people doing?"
(Hagège, Le comox lhaamen de Colombie britannique, Amerindia, n° spécial, Paris,
AEA, 1981, 152-156).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> These are some of the cases which occur to me now,
pending other data from my more recent fieldworks. Concerning Mandarin ganma,
cited in Ultan 1978, 229 (not gannma, as is written there), I don't think
it can be considered to be an interrogative verb: it cannot appear without
being followed by an other verb, and it means "doing what and then V?", or is
simply an equivalent of weishenme "why?".</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> 2) Depending on the
language, the interrogative verb may or may not be a verbal use of an
interrogative word which can appear as another category and with functions
other than predicate. The famous ano of Tagalog, cited by David, is, I think,
well-known to Austronesists for being very versatile. It may serve as the
interrogative substitute, as well, of a noun, an adjective, a ma-attributive, or
a verb. But in Palauan and in Comox, the interrogative verbs function
exclusively as such, as far as I can judge. And one, at least, of these
languages, i.e. Palauan, has a robust N-V distinction.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> 3) Tagalog ano, when
used as a verb, can be intransitive ("be what?"), transitive ("do what?"),
ditransitive ("do what to X?"), passive-causative ("be caused to be, do, etc.
what?"), etc., with all the affixing morphology wich is characteristic of many
Austronesian verb systems.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> 4) "being what?",
"doing what?", "saying what?", but also other meanings and grammatical
relationships are found among pro-verbs of various languages. I don't know
of a "perceiving what?" pro-verb.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> Speaking of interrogative words, I have a
question : does anyone know languages having interrogative relators? If it were
a preposition, for instance, it would be, representing the interrogative relator
as wh-ip (ip = interrogative preposition), something like</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> he worked wh-ip John?, </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>where wh-ip means "for, or with, or because of,
etc."</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Best,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Claude</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial> </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Claude Hagège<BR><A
href="mailto:claude.hagege@free.fr">claude.hagege@free.fr</A></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>