title: A cross-linguistic comparison of content interrogatives
title: Ein sprachübergreifender Vergleich der Fragewörter
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Liu, Siyu
Publisher: name: Philipps-Universität Marburg
Year: 2023
Subjects: Sprachvielfalt
cluster analysis
Sprachtypologie
massively parallel text
language diversity
Language, Linguistics
Sprachwissenschaft, Linguistik
content interrogatives
linguistic typology

description: This dissertation explores the diversity of content interrogatives and the intricate semantic distinctions both between and within interrogative categories. The research employs the Massively Parallel Text method with which 413 interrogative contexts are collected from Bible translations in 88 languages. By observing the interrogative codings used in these contexts, this study inductively identifies six major categories and 38 sub-categories with the aid of the quantitative technique Cluster Analysis. Furthermore, the statistical results suggest the representative context for each interrogative category and sub-category. These exemplars can be used as a template for the characterisation of content interrogatives in language description. This research also illustrates cross-linguistically typical derivations within and across the identified interrogative categories based on the codings applied in these representative contexts. These derivations can be interpreted as typical diachronic pathways for content interrogatives.
Chapter 1 begins with an elaborate introduction of the research object, i.e., content interrogatives (Section 1.2). Subsequently, Section 1.3 presents a discussion of methodological issues relevant to linguistic comparison across languages. Section 1.4 lists the research questions. Section 1.5 provides an overview of the previous studies carried out on content interrogatives. The outline of this book is found in Section 1.6.
Chapter 2 focuses on the research methods used in this study. Section 2.1 presents the Massively Parallel Text method. Section 2.2 introduces quantitative approaches used for data analysis. Chapter 3 embarks on providing information on the Parallel Bible Corpus, which is the source of data for this investigation (Section 3.1). Section 3.2 presents the sampling strategy and the sampled languages. Section 3.3 and 3.4 describe the procedure of data collection and processing in detail. Section 3.5 introduces the online repository in which all data of this study is stored.
Chapter 4 discusses the results of this study. Section 4.1 provides general information on the clustering of interrogative contexts. A total of 413 interrogative contexts are classified into six primary categories: TIME (Section 4.2), PLACE (Section 4.3), PERSON (Section 4.4), THING (Section 4.5), INTENTION (Section 4.6) and MANNER/EXTENT (Section 4.7). Furthermore, the second level of clustering identifies 38 interrogative sub-classes within these six categories. These sub-classes are illustrated in their respective sections.
II
Chapter 5 presents the significant derivational links between interrogative sub-categories based on the interrogative constructions used in the representative contexts. Section 5.1 first provides general notes on identifying derivations. Section 5.2 to 5.6 present the derivational connections within TIME, PLACE, PERSON, THING, MANNER/EXTENT, respectively. Finally, Section 5.7 illustrates the derivations across six primary interrogative categories.