Interrogatives in South-Central Tibeto-Burman

Résumé En

This paper will provide the first broad comparative survey of interrogative particles and constructions across the South Central (SC, aka Kuki-Chin) subgroup of Tibeto-Burman since initial comparative remarks on the topic by Grierson and Konow in the Linguistic Survey of India. This paper outlines the formal characteristics of polar and content questions across SC, and posits several working reconstructions for interrogative word forms. These interrogative word forms are drawn from the various structures of polar questions and content questions as documented in extant wordlists and grammars of SC languages. Though the structural phenomena herein are not highly irregular in the context of SC languages, specific phenomena like stem alternation are especially apparent in the formation of polar questions. One of this paper’s primary goals is to advise future research in stem alternation by presenting precise interrogative constructions where this phenomena surfaces. Although there has not been much systematic discussion for a wide range of languages, it is possible to comment on the general structural characteristics of interrogative sentences based on existing descriptions. Three fundamental generalizations are: (a) SC interrogatives tend to involve a final particle; (b) interrogatives as opposed to other sentence types may involve a particular verbal stem alternant; (c) specific question types may also exhibit a mid-sentence interrogative particle.