Corpus approach to the typology of content questions in Yorùbá

Abstract

Our observation of usage data of content questions in Yorùbá and a review of the few available studies on them show discrepancies between both. Two issues are of particular interest to us. First, we consider the morphosyntactic specifications of items that invoke content questions in the language. There are two main lines of argument on this: one, a contention that overt verbs and nominal operators instantiate these questions, and two, a position that such questions are best initiated by covert Inter-P particle. Second, we study proper placement of the Yorùbá language among world languages in the light of Cheng's Clause Typing Hypothesis (CTH). Extracting 2909 content question tokens from a corpus of 1,017,302 words, we infer that (1) content questions are formed by overt items, two particles – dà and ńkọ́, and four nouns – ta, kí, èló and èwo (with verbs completely excluded); (2) content questions in Yorùbá are initiated in-situ. We justify our second inference contending that the dislocation of questioned arguments to the left periphery in Yorùbá does not invoke interrogative mood but for focusing that is determined by discourse need.