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
Subdomain
word classes
Keywords
verb, interrogative
Type
rarum
Universals violated
none
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.
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.