grammaticalization of negatives/interrogatives

[Edith Moravcsik]

Matti,

As far as I know, the morphemes "my" in Thai, "khong" in Vietnamese, and
"-aa" in Tamil (transcriptions approximate) are both negators and polar
question markers.

The Mandarin Chinese question marker "ma" is said to have historically
derived from a negator. The same is claimed for the Latin polar question
marker "-ne".

Edith Moravcsik

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matti Miestamo" <matmies at LING.HELSINKI.FI>
To: <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 07:33 AM
Subject: grammaticalization of negatives/interrogatives


> Dear List Members,
>
> A possible source for polar interrogative markers is the use of negative
> markers as tag questions, and I'd be interested to hear about any
> attested cases of such developments; Heine & Kuteva briefly mention this
> possibility in their World Lexicon of Grammaticalization but do not
> discuss any attested cases (they do discuss the role of negation in the
> A-not-A interrogative construction, but this is not what I'm after).
>
> I'd also be interested in any other cases of grammaticalization where a
> negative marker has developed into a question marker or vice versa.
>
> Thanks and best wishes,
> Matti
>
>
> --
>
> Matti Miestamo
> <http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~matmies/>