The "null" question word

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hoelzro
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The "null" question word

Post by hoelzro »

I was in Dutch class last night, and we were covering Dutch sentence structure and the placement of the verb. Like German (my second language), the verb is always in the second position in Dutch (it and German are among the so-called V2 languages). For example:
Ik besteel een kaffe nu.
Nu besteel ik een kaffe.
They both mean "I'm ordering a coffee now", but the second one places more stress on the "now" in the sentence. This order also applies to questions...
Wat wil je drinken?
...unless it's a yes/no question:
Wil je een biertje drinken?
So far, yes/no questions are the only exception; when I took a look at this last night, I got to thinking. It's almost like there's a "null" question word in the sentence, which would fulfill the V2 aspect of the language!
(null) wil je een biertje drinken?
Are there any languages that have an additional question word for this "null" question word behavior? This may be a silly idea, but when I thought it up, I thought it was kinda cool.

-Rob

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Pole, the
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Re: The "null" question word

Post by Pole, the »

Do you mean the interrogative particle?

The funny inverse is Slavic li, placed in the second place of sentence.
The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

Yng
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Re: The "null" question word

Post by Yng »

Feles wrote:Do you mean the interrogative particle?
I think he's just proposing that there is a null interrogative particle which forces the subject to move beyond the verb. Works-ish, I suppose, although given that there are other times that Dutch does not obey V2 order (IIRC) which can't be explained away in this way we might as well just recognise that there are exceptions.
كان يا ما كان / يا صمت العشية / قمري هاجر في الصبح بعيدا / في العيون العسلية

tà yi póbo tsùtsùr ciivà dè!

short texts in Cuhbi

Risha Cuhbi grammar

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Miekko
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Re: The "null" question word

Post by Miekko »

Yng wrote:
Feles wrote:Do you mean the interrogative particle?
I think he's just proposing that there is a null interrogative particle which forces the subject to move beyond the verb. Works-ish, I suppose, although given that there are other times that Dutch does not obey V2 order (IIRC) which can't be explained away in this way we might as well just recognise that there are exceptions.
Other exceptions include imperative, I guess?

Swedish has about a handful of adverbs that go between the subject (or other fronted constituent) and the verb - kanske, ~nästan, ...
< Cev> My people we use cars. I come from a very proud car culture-- every part of the car is used, nothing goes to waste. When my people first saw the car, generations ago, we called it šuŋka wakaŋ-- meaning "automated mobile".

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Haplogy
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Re: The "null" question word

Post by Haplogy »

hoelzro wrote:
Ik besteel een kaffe nu.
Nu besteel ik een kaffe.
'Besteel,' is a form of the verb 'bestelen,' which means 'to steal from.'
The word you're looking for is 'bestel,' from the verb 'bestellen,' which means 'to order.'
Also, 'kaffe' isn't a Dutch word, it's the name of some obscure Bulgarian band. The word you're looking for, is 'koffie.'
Knowledge is power, and power corrupts. So study hard and be evil!

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linguoboy
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Re: The "null" question word

Post by linguoboy »

Esmelthien wrote:Also, 'kaffe' isn't a Dutch word, it's the name of some obscure Bulgarian band. The word you're looking for, is 'koffie.'
Maybe coffee is what he's stealing from an obscure Bulgarian band? I presume if they named themselves for it then they must have a lot of it.

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Re: The "null" question word

Post by zompist »

hoelzro, you've succeeded in re-inventing part of generative grammar from approximately fifty years ago... namely, invisible Q elements.

It's not really the best part, either... after all, postulating invisible Q elements is not really better than just saying "Questions do such and such."

But anyway, your Dutch data seems to be standard Germanic V2 inversion. In some ways it's English that's the odd bird here. OE behaved much more like German and Dutch still do.

hoelzro
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Re: The "null" question word

Post by hoelzro »

I realize there are likely other exceptions in the language; I just had a thought about an "empty string" question word and thought it was interesting enough to share with the forum.

Esmelthien, thanks for the corrections; I'm still learning, and the spelling is something I need to improve, and my German provides an interesting influx of mismatched vocabulary and pronuncications when I try to speak or write Dutch. =)

spats
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Re: The "null" question word

Post by spats »

Also, English is not V2 and fronts the verb in questions, which suggests that there is some other mechanism at work in the Germanic languages. WALS classifies this separately, as "Interrogative Word Order" but it is fairly rare and mostly constrained to Germanic.

English's approach is hybrid, as it fronts the verb but also requires the use of an auxiliary, which leaves the rest of the sentence in the same order and effectively functions as a (conjugated) question particle.

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