Building modifier questions from anaphors in Ktunaxa

Abstract

Ktunaxa—a language isolate spoken in parts of British Columbia and Montana—asks questions about manners, locations, and times using two distinct grammatical elements in different positions: a particle that is structurally high and signals that a modifier question is being asked (the ‘wh kernel’) and a preverb that is low and signals the type of the modifier question (the ‘descriptive content marker’, or DCM). DCMs have an independent distribution as anaphors for properties of events. In questions, the wh kernel binds this variable and yields an alternative set. Ktunaxa’s two-part strategy for expressing modifier questions—one word dedicated to forming the question and one word dedicated to defining the question type—puts a new spin on the Japanese-style architecture of wh questions, with the second element an anaphor rather than an indefinite. That sheds light on the building blocks of questions more broadly.