140317 VO Interrogative Structures and Implicational Universals across African Languages (2018W)

Asking questions is one of the most fundamental functions in human language and cognition. This course will give the student an introduction to the typology of interrogatives.Typology and language universals are mutually dependent as succinctly summarized by Comrie (1981,1989): first, without knowing individual types of structural variation it is impossible to find out which logically possible structural variants cannot co-occur; second, if research on language typology is to achieve classificational criteria for all languages, it must be based on parameters which are universal; and third, it is only possible to find universal abstractions if the parameters are adequate.

In this spirit, we will address the following questions by looking through African languages: how do people who speak different languages ask questions differently? What do the questions have in common in terms of formal syntactic properties?

Methods: Lectures, research project, student presentations, group discussions