Content Interrogatives in Pichis Ashéninca: Corpus Study and Typological Comparison

Abstract

Most languages in the world distinguish various content interrogatives, like English who, what, where, when, which, how, and why. However, Givon (1990; 2001) has claimed that in Pichis Asheninca, an Arawakan language from Peru, there is only one content interrogative, tsica, that covers all possible interrogative meanings. In this article, I argue against this analysis. Based on a corpus of questions in Pichis Asheninca, extracted from texts, I argue that most content questions do indeed use the word tsica, but the interrogative meaning is further specified by the construction in which it is used. When the different interrogative constructions are properly distinguished, Pichis Asheninca distinguishes almost all interrogative categories expected from a European perspective. Still, the structure of these interrogative constructions in Pichis Asheninca is special from a typological viewpoint because of these characteristics: (1) there is no distinction between ‘who’ and ‘what’; (2) all content interrogative...