A typology of alternative questions in Chinese and other East Asian languages

Abstract

This paper presents a typological study of the coding strategies of alternative questions (AQs) in Chinese and its linguistic neighbours in Asia. An AQ is a type of question in which the speaker asks the hearer to decide which of two or more alternatives holds. Previous studies have noted that some languages use a general disjunctive conjunction to connect the alternatives while others use an AQ-dedicated conjunction, like haishi 還是 in Mandarin. Our investigation finds that this latter kind of conjunction is preferred in southern varieties of Chinese, while some northern Chinese dialects tend to drop the conjunction and add a modal particle to each alternative. The divergence reflects a more general picture of AQ-type distribution across and beyond East Asia, where languages in the north and the west with OV order prefer to add a question marker to each alternative without using conjunctions, while languages in the east and the south with VO order prefer to use a conjunction and allow the items to be non-question-marked. In the transition zone from OV to VO, two atypical AQ types emerge in Sinitic languages. One type uses modal particles or the copula verb shi 是 as the connector; the other type simply juxtaposes the alternatives without any marking, or adds a modal particle or shi 是 to each option. With data from and beyond East Asian languages, we argue that many of the AQ-dedicated conjunctions developed from non-assertion markers in the sentence-initial position, which is more likely to happen in VO languages.