The structure of content questions in Cheyenne

Abstract

This article has as its main goal to investigate interrogative sentences in Cheyenne and therefore adds to the diversity of such analyses found in other Algonquian languages. This paper attempts to provide evidence that content questions in this language differ in structure depending on the status of the questioned element as an argument or adjunct and that content questions involving an interrogative pronoun are bi-clausal, as they exhibit a cleft-like structure such that the fronted ‘wh’-word functions as the stative predicate of a copular clause that is generated sentence-initially encoding the focus of the construction. By contrast, content questions requiring an interrogative adverb are mono-clausal and exhibit ‘wh’-movement in the traditional sense, that is through ‘wh’-fronting. Thus, this paper intends to contribute to the long-standing discussion on whether Algonquian ‘wh’-questions have a mono-clausal structure, involving traditional ‘wh’-movement or a bi-clausal structure, exhibiting ‘wh’-clefting.