The Syntax-Semantics Group will hold its next meeting on Monday, October 19th, at 1-2pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department, 1085 Dr. Penfield. Online participants can join with this zoom link.
Hannah Katinsky (McGill) will be presenting “‘What’ is a verb? Question formation in Kanien’kéha”. Here is the abstract:
Languages like English have two ways of forming wh-questions: simple mono-clausal constructions (‘what did you see’) and bi-clausal cleft constructions (‘what is it that you saw’). However, multiple strategies of question formation are not necessarily available to every language. This talk discusses strategies of question formation in Kanien’kéha (Northern Iroquoian). I argue that only bi-clausal strategies of question formation are available in Kanien’kéha. Following Royer et. al (2026)’s analysis of wh-questions in Chuj, I present morphological evidence showing that certain Kanien’kéha wh-items should be treated as predicational elements, instead of part of the nominal domain. I discuss how this proposal can account for a few exceptional aspects of wh-questions in Kanien’kéha: the ban on multiple wh-questions, the lack of wh-in-situ, and the appearance of ‘discontinuous’ wh-questions.