Nandao-Questions as a Special Kind of Rhetorical Questions

This paper reexamines the conventional classification of questions in the Formosan language Paiwan: polar, disjunctive, and wh-questions and seeks to rectify some previous observations and offer a more insightful taxonomy. Specifically, we support the position in Egli (1990) and Huang et al. (1999) and demonstrate that polar questions are formed by a rising intonation alone and that the putative polar question particles (ui) dri, (ui) pai, na, and ui lja are in fact polar question tags, while a and ayau are non-interrogative interjection particles. There are thus no morphosyntactically formed polar questions in Paiwan. Crucially, questions formed with the sentence-initial tuki and its variants aki, ki, and tui are disjunctive questions, not polar questions. We argue that manu, previously seen as a disjunctive interrogative conjunction, is actually an emphatic adverbial instead, meaning ‘in the end,’ which can thus appear in all types of questions and declaratives. Disjunctive questions, in either A-or-B or A-not-A form, can also be formed with a silent disjunctive interrogative conjunction. Finally, we demonstrate that disjunctive and wh-questions share fundamental properties and should be recognized as two subcategories of constituent questions, as opposed to polar questions. A two-way distinction is thus obtained for questions in Paiwan.

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On a dichotomy of question types: the case of Mandarin Chinese and Changsha Xiang

Her

Che

Bodomo

2022

The Linguistic Review

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Contrary to the conventional three-way distinction of questions: polar questions, disjunctive questions, and wh-questions, we argue for a more revealing two-way distinction of polar versus constituent questions, the latter with two subtypes: disjunctive and wh-questions. Following Bhatt, Rajesh & Veneeta Dayal. 2020. Polar question particles: Hindi-Urdu kya. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 38. 1115–1144 proposal that polar questions denote singleton sets of propositions and the standard view that disjunctive and wh-questions denote sets with multiple propositions, we further characterize this dichotomy pragmatically as confirmation-seeking (CS) and information-seeking (IS), i.e., polar questions seek confirmation of the proposition put forth, while constituent questions seek information specifically targeted by the interrogative constituent. This dichotomy is formally detected in Mandarin Chinese via the question particle ma versus ne, dichotomy of fragment questions, adverb nandao ‘don’t tell me’ versus daodi ‘after all’, respective (in)ability to serve as indirect questions, and an intervention effect on constituent questions. We then discuss the typological implications of this two-way distinction and demonstrate that the Changsha dialect of Xiang, another Sinitic language, has no CS polar questions as the alleged polar questions are all disjunctive questions. This fact suggests that, while there are two major types of questions cross-linguistically, CS polar questions are not universal.

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Nandao-Questions as a Special Kind of Rhetorical Questions

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

The prosodic marking of rhetorical questions in Standard Chinese

The prosodic marking of rhetorical questions in Standard Chinese

On a dichotomy of question types

On a dichotomy of question types: the case of Mandarin Chinese and Changsha Xiang

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