Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume I: Clause Structure, Second edition
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Lgg Typology, Synt Description v. I - Clause structure
Parts-of-speech systems 31 To turn now from pronouns to pro-forms of other types, the following types of pro-forms are discussed in turn below: pro-sentences, pro-clauses, pro-verbs, pro-adjectives, pro-adverbs, and interrogative pro-forms. This listing is not intended to be exhaustive. For example, it is argued in Schachter (1978) that the italicized words of sentences like (85) should be identified as pro-predicates: (85) Jack fell down, but Jill didn’t Jill isn’t crying, but Jack is But this parts-of-speech type does not seem to be common enough to warrant discussion here. Pro-sentences are words like English yes and no, which are used in answering questions, and which are understood as equivalent to affirmative and negative sentences respectively. (For example, in answer to Is it raining?, Yes is equiva- lent to It’s raining and No to It isn’t raining.) While most languages have such pro-sentences, they are not universal. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, the affirmative answer to a polar question is whatever verb occurred in the ques- tion, while the negative answer is bu ‘not’ optionally followed by this verb, as illustrated in (86). (86) Ni qu ma? Qu / Bu (qu) you go q go / not (go) ‘Are you going?’ ‘Yes’/ ‘No’ There are also languages, however, which have a larger set of pro-sentences than English does. One rather common phenomenon is for yes to have two different equivalents, according to whether the question being answered is in the affirmative or in the negative. The following examples are from French: (87) Il vient? Oui he comes yes ‘Is he coming?’ ‘Yes’ (88) Il ne vient pas? Si (il vient) he neg comes not yes (he comes) ‘Isn’t he coming?’ ‘Yes (he’s coming)’ Another common phenomenon is the occurrence of a set of distinctive pro- sentences that are used in answer to existential questions (ones equivalent to English questions with Is(n’t) there?, etc.). For example, in Tagalog the usual equivalents of yes and no are oo and hindi respectively: (89) Umuulan ba? Oo /Hindi is. raining q ‘Is it raining?’ ‘Yes’ /‘No’ 32 Paul Schachter and Timothy Shopen In answer to existential questions, however, the existential pro-sentences may- roon and wala are used instead: (90) Mayroon ba-ng pagkain? Mayroon /Wala exist q-link food ‘Is there any food?’ ‘Yes’ /‘No’ (As the question in (90) shows, mayroon is also used as an existential marker (cf. section 2.5) in non-pro-form sentences. The same is true of wala, which occurs as a negative existential marker.) One common type of pro-clause is the question tag: a word with the force of a question which is appended to another clause. Some question tags are used to form alternative questions, others to form confirmation questions. Alternative questions are equivalent to certain English questions with or (e.g. Is it raining or not?), and quite commonly it is a word meaning ‘or’ that is used as an alternative-question tag, as in the following example from Hausa: (91) Ana ruwa, ko? one. is rain or ‘Is it raining or not?’ Confirmation questions are questions in which the speaker is asking for confir- mation of a statement to which the question tag is appended. An example, from Tagalog, is: (92) Umuulan, ano? is. raining confirmation tag ‘It’s raining, isn’t it?’ In a good many languages, the equivalent of a question tag is expressed by a fixed idiomatic formula: for example French n’est-ce pas (literally ‘is that not’) or German nicht wahr (literally ‘not true’). (In English the formula equivalent to a question tag is not fixed, but varies with the preceding statement: cf. You haven’t eaten, have you?; John left, didn’t he?; etc.) Another type of pro-clause is the so or not of English sentences like (93) John says that it will rain, but I don’t think so John says that it will rain, but I think not (So and not in such cases are substitutes for that clauses: cf. I don’t think that it will rain, I think that it won’t rain.) In some languages, the same words that are |
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