Towards a typology of interrogative verbs

Abstract

Although various types of interrogative words have been thoroughly studied, such is not the case for interrogative verbs. The latter possess the morphosyntactic features of verbs, but in addition they question what they themselves express, the very predicate. Based on a sample of languages from all parts of the world, this article, after introducing interrogative verbs, illustrates them from various languages and indicates their main morphological, syntactic, and semantic characteristics. It then examines three important questions, namely why interrogative verbs have developed in certain languages, why interrogative verbs may be considered typologically unusual, and what relationships exist between interrogative verbs and other possible interrogative words. The article ends with a map showing the areal distribution of interrogative verbs.