WHAT vs. WHO

[Holger Diessel]

I have looked at the semantic features of interrogatives in a sample of
100 languages, and I have only found two languages that do not
distinguish between the features person and thing, Latvian and Khasi.
Interestingly, although demonstratives and interrogatives tend to encode
the same ontological features (e.g. person/thing, place, direction,
time, manner, amount), they differ with regard to the person-thing
distinction: while interrogatives almost always differentiate between
human and nonhuman referents, demonstratives are usually not marked for
humanness. In the vast majority of languages, the same demonstratives
refer to both persons and things, or they are exclusively used with
reference to inanimates (or nonhumans).

Holger Diessel


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Holger Diessel (Ph.D.)
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Inselstr. 22
D-04103 Leipzig
Germany
Tel.: +49-341-995-2403
Email: diessel at eva.mpg.de
http://email.eva.mpg.de/~diessel/
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