First Draft – June 2025
Author: [Nikolett Mus]
The morphosyntactic analysis of interrogative constructions offers valuable insights from multiple perspectives. A significant contribution lies in informing hypotheses about the basic word order of a language, since prior typological research has uncovered systematic, albeit non-deterministic, correlations between canonical word order and the strategies used to form content questions, such as for instance the placement of wh-elements. While these correlations do not constitute direct predictive rules, they can nevertheless guide comparative analysis and fieldwork.
Furthermore, patterns in the formation of interrogative constructions can serve as diagnostics for syntactic reanalysis or broader typological shifts. Interrogative structures may help to identify the stage of a language within ongoing grammatical change and to trace the pathways through which such change unfolds, particularly in cases where interrogative marking interacts with evolving syntactic or information-structural systems.
This questionnaire is intended to facilitate the investigation of the morphosyntactic structure of wh-questions, with particular emphasis on SOV languages. Nevertheless, the framework may also inform studies of wh-questions in languages with other basic word orders. Users are encouraged to adapt the diagnostics as appropriate to their language contexts.
The questionnaire is especially designed for use in languages where interrogative constructions remain underdocumented or have not yet been subjected to detailed syntactic analysis. The aim is to provide a structured framework that supports the elicitation of relevant data and guides descriptive work in contexts where the positional behavior of wh-elements is not yet well understood.
Accordingly, the document does not offer a comprehensive theoretical analysis but instead functions as a practical orientation tool. Its central goal is to help identify and clarify the key factors, especially the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of wh-elements, that may influence their distribution and positioning within the clause.
In addition to outlining diagnostic questions, this document also highlights relevant patterns, constraints, and generalisations observed in cross-linguistic research. These are intended to aid in the interpretation of novel or unexpected syntactic behaviors encountered during fieldwork or descriptive analysis, and to offer a point of reference for hypothesis formation and testing.
This questionnaire is part of an ongoing project aimed at systematically documenting and comparing the typological variation of wh-interrogatives across languages. While the current version outlines a number of core parameters in detail, additional areas are under active development. The following topics represent key aspects that will be addressed in future iterations of the questionnaire, either through expanded discussion, refined diagnostics, or the inclusion of additional cross-linguistic data.
This aspect of wh-words concerns the systematic identification of their parts of speech. It involves analysing its morphological behaviour (e.g., case, number, agreement) and syntactic distribution. Although not strictly part of parts-of-speech classification, it is also important to observe the morphosyntactic patterns that emerge within phrases containing wh-elements. These properties often vary across wh-forms even within a single language, and they significantly influence clause-level phenomena, such as linear position, movement potential, and interpretive constraints.
For this parameter, there are three main issues should be examined:
This document is part of the ThEA - Theoretical and experimental approaches to dialectal variation and contact-induced change: a case study of Tundra Nenets (NKFIH FK129235) and is freely available for reuse. If you use it, please cite the project ID accordingly (NKFIH FK129235). .