Rara #120

Legacy number: 120

 Number  120
 Phenomenon  interrogative pro verbs
 Found in  Southern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan); Chukchi (Chukchi-Kamchatkan); Mandarin (Chinese, Sino-Tibetan); Yankunytjatjara (aka Western Desert (PN), Kayardild ((non?) PN), and many other Australian lgs; Hua ("Papuan"); Tagalog (Philippine), colloquial varieties of Malay/Indonesian, Tahitian (Polynesian), probably widespread throughout Austronesian; Kinyarwanda (Bantu, Niger-Congo)
 Domain  syntax — word classes
 Type  rarum
 Keywords  verb, interrogative
 Source  Ultan, Russell (1969). Some general characteristics of interrogative systems. Working Papers on Language Universals 1: 39-63a; p. 53.
Sadock, Jerold M. & Arnold M. Zwicky (1985). Speech act distinctions in syntax. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Syntactic description and linguistic typology, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 184.
Bickel, Balthasar (1991). Typologische Grundlagen der Satzverknüpfung. Zürich: Universität Zürich, pp. 96f., 124.
Lazard, Gilbert & L. Peltzer (2000). Structure de la langue tahitienne. Paris: Louvain
Nick Evans, p.c.; David Gil, p.c.
 Violates  none

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Discussion
Notes
schematically: ?The dog WHATed the boy?? ? ?It bit him?, ?The dog HOWed? ? ?It howled like this? In English, the pro NP for things, what, would seem to lend itself to such a verbal use, too.
Comment
Frans Plank · 21 Sep 2006
schematically:
'The dog WHATed the boy?' – 'It bit him',
'The dog HOWed?' – 'It howled like this'

In English, the pro NP for things, what, would seem to lend itself to such a verbal use, too.