Interrogatives in Polysynthetic Languages

Interrogatives are used to elicit a particular piece of information from the addressee. As other sentence types, interrogatives tend to have their own structural characteristics. Although some observations were made by analyzing the data of various languages, there is no extensive knowledge of how interrogatives are formed in polysynthetic languages. Polysynthetic languages, i.e. languages with extensive marking on verbs, may provide compelling data on interrogatives, as they have widely been known for their peculiarities of grammar. In this study I investigated interrogative constructions in 22 polysynthetic languages by comparing the data retrieved from the grammars. As a result, I revealed the patterns of marking interrogativity in polar and content questions, examined the possibility of interrogative word incorporation and predicative use of interrogative words. Although due to the scarcity of data I could not establish whether any patterns of interrogative marking are more characteristic of polysynthetic languages, I could determine several reasons for the existent patterns.