Questions

Abstract

Abstract This chapter describes the various questioning strategies found in Australian languages. We begin with an overview of question-forming intonation, lexical items, and clitics and particles. Though the syntax of questions is not well documented, we survey the structures of polar, content, tag, and embedded questions. It is clear that intonation patterns and particles are commonly attested in polar questions. Questions formed with rising intonation are said to have the same syntactic structure as declarative sentences, though detailed descriptions of intonation are lacking. In many languages, interrogative words used in content questions also have indefinite readings. These uses are often distinguished based on the word order: interrogatives occur clause-initially, while indefinites occur elsewhere. Finally, we briefly discuss the semantics of questions in this chapter. This includes polarity, pragmatics of question particles, and rhetorical questions, all of which warrant further investigation in the future.