Alternative Questions/Interrogatives in Albanian Language

Questions or interrogatives are the second most commonly used class of sentences, besides declarative ones. The classification of questions is not only one of the most treated topics in linguistics but also the one that encounters many problems. In Albanian linguistics, there are classifications of questions, but there are also problems related to the terms used in describing these classes and subclasses and the grouping of interrogatives in each class. One of the two main classes of questions/interrogatives is alternative questions. This paper aims at making a clarification and classification of alternative questions and alternative interrogatives based on the semantics and syntax of the Albanian language. Furthermore, it is to be claimed that there are two sub-types of alternative questions/interrogatives, i.e. polar alternative questions and disjunctive alternative questions.Keywords: interrogatives/alternative questions in Albanian language, Polar alternative questions, interrogative particle "a", word order, intonation, The disjunction "apo", etc

Or not Alternative Questions, Focus and Discourse Structure

Or not alternative questions like Are you coming or not? give rise to so-called ‘cornering effects’ (Biezma 2009), consisting of two parts: (i) they cannot appear discourse-initially, and (ii) they do not allow for follow-up questions. Building on recent experimental data (Beltrama, Meertens & Romero 2020), the present paper raises problems for current analyses (Biezma 2009, Biezma & Rawlins 2012, 2018), reframes the second part of cornering as not specific to NAQs but as a general constraint on questions in general, and develops a novel proposal for the first part of cornering. The key ingredients of the new proposal are the intrinsic focus structure of or not questions and its effects on discourse trees

Alternative Questions in Turkish

The paper examines alternative questions in Turkish from the perspective of the size of the disjoint constituents. At the moment, there exists no consensus in the literature on the topic as to whether alternative questions involve clausal disjunction accompanied by a deletion operation in one or both of the disjuncts or they contain no phantom structure, i.e. are disjunctions of phrases no bigger than they appear on the surface. Both of these views have been proposed over the years: a big-disjunct analysis has been advocated by Gračanin-Yüksek (2016), Han and Romero (2004a, 2004b), and Roelofsen and Pruitt (2011) among others, while Beck and Kim (2006), Erlewine (2014), and Larson (1985) among others have defended the small-disjunct analysis. In this paper, looking at possible word order patterns of alternative questions in Turkish, I show that properties of alternative questions in this language cannot be explained on the small-disjunct analysis. I present evidence that underlyingly, alternative questions in Turkish involve clausal disjuncts. Next, by examining the distribution of the question particle in alternative questions and comparing it to the distribution of the same particle in polar questions, I propose that the disjuncts in Turkish alternative questions are full CPs

Suspended Affixation as Morpheme Ellipsis: Evidence from Ossetic Alternative Questions

This paper provides novel evidence that ellipsis can target bound morphemes. The evidence comes from suspended affixation of case markers in alternative questions in Digor and Iron Ossetic. The current literature on alternative questions (e.g. Does Mary like coffee or tea?) proposes that in many languages they are derived by disjunction of and ellipsis in constituents as large as a vP or even as a CP. Language-specific evidence in favor of such structure of alternative questions is available for Ossetic as well. Accordingly, the ostensible disjuncts coffee or tea do not actually form a constituent and case must be separately assigned to each of the DPs. Therefore, a case suffix shared under suspended affixation cannot attach to the orP as a whole. A deletion-based analysis can successfully derive the properties of suspended affixation in Ossetic alternative questions. I advance a specific proposal that incorporates ellipsis into the Distributed Morphology derivation

Ki – the Interrogative Disjunction Morpheme in Bangla

The main aim of the paper is to study the behavior of the particle ‘ki’ in both polar and alternative questions in the Indo-Aryan language Bangla. In the paper, it is observed that ‘ki’ is a polar question particle, and also surfaces as a disjunction marker in alternative questions. This observation generates the claim that in Bangla there is an identity relation between the polar question particle and interrogative disjunction morpheme. This further leads to the proposal that there is a disjunction operator in both polar and alternative questions in Bangla, and ‘ki’ is the lexical realization of that operator

ki and naki - Alternative Question Particles in Bangla

The primary discussion of the paper is centered on two polar question particles in the Eastern Indo-Aryan language Bangla. One is ‘ki’ and the other one is ‘naki.’ These two polar question particles also appear as interrogative disjunction morphemes in alternative questions. This further leads to the argument that there exists a disjunction operator in both polar and alternative questions and the polar question particle is the lexical realization of that disjunction operator

Alternative Questions/Interrogatives in Albanian Language

Questions or interrogatives are the second most commonly used class of sentences, besides declarative ones. The classification of questions is not only one of the most treated topics in linguistics but also the one that encounters many problems. In Albanian linguistics, there are classifications of questions, but there are also problems related to the terms used in describing these classes and subclasses and the grouping of interrogatives in each class. One of the two main classes of questions/interrogatives is alternative questions. This paper aims at making a clarification and classification of alternative questions and alternative interrogatives based on the semantics and syntax of the Albanian language. Furthermore, it is to be claimed that there are two sub-types of alternative questions/interrogatives, i.e., polar alternative questions and disjunctive alternative questions