Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Polar question particles: Hindi-Urdu kya:

  • Published:
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We distinguish between two types of interrogative particles, (regular) question particles and polar question particles. The first, canonically exemplified by Japanese -ka, occurs in all interrogatives, in matrix as well as embedded contexts. The second, the object of the present study, is exemplified by the Hindi-Urdu particle kya:. Polar kya: occurs in polar questions but not in wh questions, and it occurs optionally in matrix questions but only in a restricted way in embedded questions. We analyze this particle as presupposing that its prejacent denotes a singleton propositional set and as partitioning the questioned proposition into two parts that can be characterized as at-issue and not at-issue. These two aspects of its meaning are shown to capture several facets of the behavior of the polar question particle kya: that have not previously been analyzed or even systematically described. The paper also touches upon well-known phenomena, such as interrogative selection and alternative questions, but from a new perspective and opens up a way of looking at interrogative particles in other languages that do not seem to neatly fit the mold of regular question particles.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. We follow a common practice in the South Asian linguistic literature of using Hindi-Urdu to refer to Hindi and Urdu, which for a large number of linguistic phenomena can be considered the same language.

  2. We thank a reviewer for help with the wording.

  3. We will, however, not address the link between polar question particle kya: and thematic kya: in this paper. These two elements seem to be homophonous not just in Hindi-Urdu but in a number of other Indo-Aryan languages as well as in Italian and Slovenian. We have not conducted a wider investigation but it is likely that there is a deeper connection. What such a connection could be though is not clear to us. There is also the fact that the two elements are not fully homophonous—thematic kya: has a pitch accent. This wouldn’t eliminate an analysis where the two have a common core. Another factor to consider is that, as discussed in Syed and Dash (2017), in Bangla and Odia, the polar question particle (ki) cannot be sentence-initial while the homophonous thematic ki can be.

  4. It is possible to have the PQP in a preverbal position, but its acceptability seems to vary based on a number of factors such as the the heaviness of the following verbal complex—see for example the fully acceptable (31c) where the verbal complex consists of a participle and an auxiliary.

  5. The kya: that appears in the Hindi-Urdu scope marking construction patterns with thematic kya: in its distribution and prosodic profile.

  6. This resource was created by Miki Nishioka (Osaka University) and Lago Language Institute (2016–2017). It has around 200 million words. The full reference is: Miki Nishioka (Osaka University) and Lago Language Institute (2016–2017). Corpus Of Spoken Hindi (COSH) and COSH Conc [Software]. Available from http://www.cosh.site. Last accessed 4 January 2020.

  7. An anonymous reviewer notes that (11a) does not form a minimal pair with (11b) and offers us the following example which does form a minimal pair with the rogative.

    1. (i)

      I found out from what source the reprisals could come.

      *I found out from what source could the reprisals come.

    The fact that the restriction holds of CPs that are syntactically sisters to a P and not to the embedding verb highlights that selection cannot be a simple lexical matter.

  8. We thank Mingming Liu, Beibei Xu, Jess H.-K. Law and Yi-Hsun Chen for these judgments. See also Song (2018) for discussion related to polar question particles in Mandarin.

  9. The idea that some embedding predicates can take complements with more structure is anticipated in discussions of Spanish. The connection between structural complexity and semantic type-distinctions is articulated most explicitly in Suñer (1993). See Lahiri (2002:147) and Dayal (2016:144–147) for relevant discussion.

  10. The reasons for this fluidity are explored in Dayal (2019). For a general discussion of issues related to selection, see Dayal (2016:136–147).

  11. We thank Manfred Krifka and Maria Biezma for helpful comments in this connection.

  12. See Sect. 6.1 for non-canonical uses of polar and wh-questions.

  13. We note, though, that there are other contexts, such as unconditionals, discussed by Rawlins (2013), where the presence of complementizers such as whether is insufficient for delivering a plurality of propositions and an explicit (polar) alternative question is needed even in English.

    1. (i)
      figure u

  14. For a recent survey of embedded root phenomena, see Heycock (2017).

  15. We are setting aside the issue of bias and its relationship to intonation. For relevant discussion on Bangla and Hindi-Urdu, see Bhadra (2017) and Dayal (2016, 2019).

  16. More broadly, ForceP[+Q] will realize the intonation that characterizes the question that it embeds. So wh-questions, alternative questions, and rhetorical questions would be associated with different prosodic contours. Put differently, ForceP[+Q] will not always be realized as rising intonation. We thank a reviewer for asking us to clarify the link between our syntax and the prosody of Yes/No questions.

  17. Note that we are not claiming that there is a blanket ban on the movement of weak indefinites in Hindi-Urdu. It is, in fact, possible to move weak indefinites under appropriate conditions (Dayal 2011).

  18. An anonymous reviewer wonders whether (38) improves in the following context: A tells B that Asim and Ram visited Sita yesterday because it was her birthday. A further says that Asim gave Sita a book. B replies ‘what about Ram?’ followed by (38a). What is special about this environment is that the discourse makes available an explicit alternative to Ram and hence one might expect the left-adjacency requirement to be lifted. However, we find that (38a) is still deviant in this context while variants where ‘Ram’ follows or immediately precedes kya: are perfectly natural, especially when supplemented with bhi: ‘also’.

  19. The reader will note that (42a) and (42b) do not form a minimal pair. The minimal pair of (42a), given below in (i), is noted to be ungrammatical in Han and Romero (2004:538–543).

    1. (i)
      figure al

    We do not think that (i) is ungrammatical; the source of the problem, we believe, lies in generating the prosody needed for the Alternative Question interpretation with this structure. Some speakers, including one of us, cannot generate the required prosody but accept the Alternative Question reading when presented with questions that have the appropriate prosody.

  20. Questions with disjunction can have a choice reading where the speaker provides a choice of alternatives (e.g. What is your name or your social security number? Either will do). They can also have a cancellation reading where the speaker retracts the first question and substitutes it with a new question (e.g. What is your name? or rather what is your social security number?). We are focusing here on the choice reading of alternative questions, which has been shown to be possible with clause-level disjunction (Hirsch 2017; Ciardelli et al. 2019). See also Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984), Haida and Repp (2013), Krifka (2001), Szabolcsi (1997, 2016). An interesting fact about Hindi-Urdu is that the disjunction operators ya:/ki do not lend themselves to cancellation type readings, for which balki ‘rather’ needs to be used. We set this aside as it does not affect the analysis of the PQP kya: in this paper.

  21. Maribel Romero (p.c.) has directed our attention to examples like Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?. Syntactically these are disjunctions of two polar questions and yet it is natural to respond to them as a Yes/No question i.e. the explicit disjunction of polar questions does not force an Alternative Question interpretation. We believe that for a Yes/No interpretation to be available the two polar questions have to be asking parts of a higher-level question—here this could be Do you have an association with the Communist Party?

  22. Two anonymous reviewers ask how we derive an alternative question, one that presupposes the answer to be only ‘p’ or ‘q’, from a disjunction of two Yes/No questions, each of which allows for a positive and a negative answer (‘p’, ‘¬ p’, ‘q’, ‘¬ q’). On our view, each polar question disjunct denotes only one answer that can either be accepted or denied. When the two combine by set union, we get {p, q} and it is to this set that an answerhood operator applies to yield the unique true answer (see Dayal 2016). Other approaches to building alternative questions out of a disjunction of polar questions have to make analogous moves (see Dayal 2016:261–265 for discussion and further references).

  23. We only show the TP fronting option as fronting the CP is semantically equivalent.

  24. Biezma et al. (2017; slide 32) note that polar questions can be asked even when a speaker expects a negative answer but polar kya: questions cannot. They are considering kya: questions with prosodically focused expressions and we agree. But without such focus, our judgement is that expectations about a negative answer pose no problems to kya:.

  25. Incredulity questions have not been studied in depth and in the case of polar questions they are notoriously hard to separate from echo questions and/or biased declarative questions. The interested reader is directed to the discussion in Dayal (2016: 8, 279–282) and references there.

References

  • Alonso-Ovalle, Luis. 2006. Disjunction in alternative semantics. PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

  • Atlamaz, Ümit. 2015. A bidimensional semantics for questions. Qualifying Paper, Rutgers University.

  • Aygen, Gulsat. 2011. Q-particle. Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi 4 (1).

  • Bajaj, Vandana. 2016. Scaling up exclusive -hii. PhD diss., Rutgers University.

  • Bartels, Christine. 1997. Towards a compositional interpretation of English statement and question intonation. PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

  • Bhadra, Diti. 2017. Evidentiality and questions: Bangla at the interfaces. PhD diss., Rutgers University.

  • Bhatt, Rajesh, and Veneeta Dayal. 2014. Polar-kyaa: Y/N or Speech Act Operator? Presented at the Workshop on Non-Canonical Questions and Interface Issues, Hegne February 2014. https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/6/2964/files/2020/01/polar-kyaa.pdf.

  • Biezma, María. 2009. Alternative vs polar questions: The cornering effect. In Semantic and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 19, eds. Ed Cormany, Satoshi Ito, and David Lutz, 37–54. Ithaca: Cornell Linguistics Club.

    Google Scholar 

  • Biezma, María, and Kyle Rawlins. 2012. Responding to alternative and polar questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 35 (5): 361–406.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Biezma, María, Miriam Butt, and Farhat Jabeen. 2017. Interpretations of Urdu/Hindi polar kya. Slides of talk at the Workshop on Non-At-Issue Meaning and Information Structure at the University of Konstanz.

  • Bolinger, Dwight. 1978. Yes-no questions are not alternative questions. In Questions, ed. Henry Hiz, 87–105. Dordrecht: Reidel.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Büring, Daniel. 2017. Intonation and meaning. Oxford surveys in semantics and pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butt, Miriam, Tina Bögel, and Farhat Jabeen. 2017. Urdu/Hindi questions at the syntax-pragmatics-prosody interface. Slides of talk at Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL) 7 at MIT.

  • Caponigro, Ivano, and Jon Sprouse. 2007. Rhetorical questions as questions. In Sinn und Bedeutung 11, ed. Estela P. Waldmüller, 121–133. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cheng, Lisa L. S. 1991. On the typology of wh-questions. PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Distributed by MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.

  • Ciardelli, Ivano, Jeroen Groenendijk, and Floris Roelofsen. 2019. Inquisitive semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dayal, Veneeta. 1995. Quantification in correlatives. In Quantification in natural languages, eds. Emmon Bach, Eloise Jelinek, Angelika Kratzer, and Barbara H. Partee. Studies in linguistics and philosophy, 179–205. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dayal, Veneeta. 2011. Hindi pseudo-incorporation. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29 (1): 123–167.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dayal, Veneeta. 2016. Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Dayal, Veneeta. 2019. The fine structure of the interrogative left periphery. Ms., Yale University.

  • Dayal, Veneeta, and Jane Grimshaw. 2009. Subordination at the interface: A quasi-subordination hypothesis. Ms., Rutgers University.

  • Farkas, Donka F., and Kim B. Bruce. 2010. On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of Semantics 27 (1): 81–118.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Farkas, Donka F., and Floris Roelofsen. 2017. Division of labor in the interpretation of declaratives and interrogatives. Journal of Semantics 34 (2): 237–289.

    Google Scholar 

  • Féry, Caroline, Pramod Pandey, and Gerrit Kentner. 2016. The prosody of focus and givenness in Hindi and Indian English. Studies in Language 40 (2): 302–339.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gawron, Jean Mark. 2001. Universal concessive conditional and alternative nps in English. In Logical perspectives on language and information, eds. Cleo Condoravdi and Gerard Renardel de Lavalette, 73–105. Stanford: CSLI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Genzel, Susanne, and Frank Kügler. 2010. The prosodic expression of contrast in Hindi. In Speech prosody 2010. Available at http://www.isle.illinois.edu/speechprosody2010/papers/100143.pdf. Accessed 4 January 2020.

    Google Scholar 

  • Göksel, Asli, and Celia Kerslake. 2004. Turkish: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Groenendijk, Jeroen, and Martin Stokhof. 1984. Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers. PhD diss., University of Amsterdam.

  • Gunlogson, Christine. 2003. True to form: Rising and falling declaratives as questions in English. Outstanding dissertations in linguistics. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haida, Andreas, and Sophie Repp. 2013. Disjunction in wh-questions. In North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 40, eds. Seda Kan, Claire Moore-Cantwell, and Robert Staubs, 259–272. Amherst: GLSA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Han, Chunghye, and Maribel Romero. 2004. Syntax of whether/q...or questions: Ellipsis combined with movement. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22 (3): 527–564.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heycock, Caroline. 2017. Embedded root phenomena. In The Blackwell companion to syntax, vol. 2, eds. Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, 174–209. Malden: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hirsch, Aron. 2017. Disjoining questions. Ms., McGill.

  • Jeong, Sunwoo. 2018. Intonation and sentence type conventions: Two types of rising declaratives. Journal of Semantics 35 (2): 305–356.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kamali, Beste, and Daniel Büring. 2011. Topics in questions. Handout of a talk presented at the Workshop on the Phonological Marking of Focus and Topic: GLOW 34.

  • Krifka, Manfred. 2001. Quantifying into question acts. Natural Language Semantics 9 (1): 1–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Krifka, Manfred. 2013. Response particles as propositional anaphors. In Semantic and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 23, 1–18. Ithaca: Cornell Linguistics Club.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krifka, Manfred. 2015. Bias in commitment space semantics: Declarative questions, negated questions, and question tags. In Semantic and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 25, 328–345. Ithaca: Cornell Linguistics Club.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kumar, Rajesh. 2003. The syntax of negation in Hindi. PhD diss, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

  • Lahiri, Utpal. 1998. Focus and negative polarity in Hindi. Natural Language Semantics 6 (1): 57–123.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lahiri, Utpal. 2002. Questions and answers in embedded contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCloskey, James. 2006. Questions and questioning in a local English. In Crosslinguistic research in syntax and semantics: Negation, tense, and clausal architecture, eds. Raffaella Zanuttini, Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger, and Paul H. Portner, 87–126. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Özyıldız, Deniz. 2018. Move to mi but only if you can. In Papers from Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL) 11, ed. Ryo Masuda. Cambridge: MITWPL.

    Google Scholar 

  • Patil, Umesh, Gerrit Kentner, Anja Gollrad, Frank Kügler, Caroline Féry, and Shravan Vasisth. 2008. Focus, word order and intonation in Hindi. Journal of South Asian Linguistics 1 (1): 55–72.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pruitt, Kathryn, and Floris Roelofsen. 2013. The interpretation of prosody in disjunctive questions. Linguistic Inquiry 44 (4): 632–650.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rawlins, Kyle. 2013. (un)conditionals. Natural Language Semantics 21 (2): 111–178.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roelofsen, Floris. 2019. Semantic theories of questions. In Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roelofsen, Floris, and Donka F. Farkas. 2015. Polarity particle responses as a window onto the interpretation of questions and assertions. Language 91 (2): 359–414.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rohde, Hannah. 2006. Rhetorical questions as redundant interrogatives. In San Diego linguistics papers 2, 134–168. San Diego: Department of Linguistics, UCSD.

    Google Scholar 

  • Song, Yixiao. 2018. A comparative study of German and Chinese alternative questions. Poster presented at the MiQ Workshop at the University of Konstanz.

  • Suñer, Margarita. 1993. About indirect questions and semi-questions. Linguistics and Philosophy 16 (1): 45–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Syed, Saurov, and Bhamati Dash. 2017. A unified account of the yes/no particle in Hindi, Bangla and Odia. In Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) in Asia 11, volume 1, ed. Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, Vol. 84. Cambridge: MITWPL.

    Google Scholar 

  • Szabolcsi, Anna. 1997. Quantifiers in pair-list readings. In Ways of scope taking, ed. Anna Szabolcsi, 311–349. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Szabolcsi, Anna. 2016. Direct vs. indirect disjunction of wh-complements, as diagnosed by subordinating complementizers. Ms., NYU.

  • Uegaki, Wataru. 2019. The semantics of question-embedding predicates. Language and Linguistics Compass 13(1): 1–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • van Rooij, Robert, and Marie Šafářová. 2003. On polar questions. In Semantic and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 13, eds. Robert Young and Yuping Zhou, 292–309. Ithaca: Cornell Linguistics Club.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Stechow, Arnim. 1996. Against lf pied-piping. Natural Language Semantics 4 (1): 57–110.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Westera, Matthijs. 2018. Rising declaratives of the Quality-suspending kind. Glossa 3(1): 121. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.415.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xu, Bebei. 2012. Nandao questions as a special kind of rhetorical question. In Semantic and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 22, ed. Anca Chereches, 488–507. Ithaca: Cornell Linguistics Club.

    Google Scholar 

  • Xu, Bebei. 2017. Question bias and biased question words in Mandarin, German and Bangla. PhD diss., Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Download references

Acknowledgements

This paper would not exist if Miriam Butt had not invited both of us and then told us to give a joint talk at the workshop on non-canonical questions in Hegne in February 2014. That got us working on this topic. We are very grateful to audiences at that workshop and at LISSIM 8, the GIAN lecture series at the University of Mumbai, the 2nd CreteLing, UMass Amherst, UCSD, Johns Hopkins, UConn, MIT, UCLA, seminars at Rutgers between 2014 and 2018, and the IATL conference in Beer Sheva. Miriam Butt, Tina Bögel, Maria Biezma, Farhat Jabeen, Gennaro Chierchia, Anoop Mahajan, Dominique Sportiche, Hilda Koopman, Roger Schwarzschild, Aron Hirsch, Irene Heim and Adrian Stegovec helped us refine our initial understanding of this phenomenon. Finally, we would like to thank our three anonymous reviewers for incredibly detailed and helpful reviews and our editor Hedde Zeijlstra who expertly shepherded us through the process.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UMass Amherst, Amherst, USA

    Rajesh Bhatt

  2. Yale University, New Haven, USA

    Veneeta Dayal

Authors
  1. Rajesh Bhatt
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Veneeta Dayal
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rajesh Bhatt.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Bhatt, R., Dayal, V. Polar question particles: Hindi-Urdu kya:. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 38, 1115–1144 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-020-09464-0

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-020-09464-0

Keywords

Search

Navigation