Epistemological Classifiers And Concealed Questions In Acehnese

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AbstractThere is a morpheme tu ‘know’ in Acehnese (Malayo‐Polynesian) that always needs to combine with so‐called epistemological classifiers specifying conceptual categories of knowledge. On the empirical side, this paper reports first‐hand data involving tu combined with epistemological classifiers. The primary purpose is to demonstrate what epistemological classifiers combine with tu, when tu takes a declarative clause, an overt wh‐clause, or a DP that receives an interrogative reading (“concealed questions”). When tu takes a declarative clause, the epistemological classifier combined with it invariably is peue ‘what.’ When tu takes an overt wh‐clause, the epistemological classifier is either the default peue ‘what’ or the same as the (surface highest) epistemological classifier in the wh‐clause. When tu embeds a concealed question DP, the epistemological classifier is morphologically sensitive to what question the DP is intended to express. The theoretical component of this paper mainly focuses on tu embedding concealed question DPs. I argue that Acehnese concealed questions are best analyzed as wh‐questions in disguise, from which the wh‐word is ellipticized at the PF level. Researchers have previously argued that the question‐in‐disguise analysis of concealed questions does not work for concealed questions in such languages as English and Spanish. Hence, the discussion of concealed questions in Acehnese suggests that the interpretation of concealed questions may show interesting and important crosslinguistic variability.