Polar Question Particles

What is it about?

The paper examines yes/no question formation in Edo, a Benue-Congo language spoken natively in Southern Nigeria. The paper posits that the morpheme nè can be classified as one of the polar question markers for the language. There are no previous discussions about interrogative uses of this word in the literature, but dictionaries indicate that the form nè is shared by the Ẹdo words which introduce relative clauses; the consequential conjunction equivalent to the English ‘so that’; and the variant of a preposition which introduces the beneficiary in a sentence. Besides these already established functions, this study demonstrates that nè can be used as a device for question formation. Like other polar question markers in the language, nè can turn other sentence types into interrogatives that require responses which begin with either a yes or a no.

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Why is it important?

In addition to a discussion of polar question particles, this paper looks at the relationship between the question markers and other morphemes which have identical phonological forms. The study treats this lexical relationship as homonymy and examines the implication it holds. The findings reveal an anti-homonymy constraint as some of the question markers cannot occur in the same sentence with their respective homonyms. This study addresses this problem of using the framework of Distributed Morphology. The explanation is that linear adjacency triggers the constraint, and that impoverishment blocks the constraint by eliminating the question markers from vocabulary insertion, when their homonyms have been inserted at other nodes within their c-command domain.

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