Question markers in Sisaali

Abstract

This thesis examines question formation in Sɩsaalɩ, a member of the Grusi sub-group of the Gur languages (Naden 1988) spoken in the Upper West Region of Ghana and some parts of Burkina Faso. I discuss the syntax of polar, alternative and content questions. Two strategies for the formation of polar questions are identified which are the phonological and syntactic strategies. While the former involves the phonological strategy of falling intonation, the latter uses the question particles occurring either at clause initially or clause finally. The question particles are kóó and dúη which are added to declarative sentences to make them polar interrogatives. Syntactically, while kóó can occur either sentence initially or finally, dúη occurs only sentence finally. These question particles analyzed as question operators never co-occur with the intonation strategy of falling intonation. Alternative questions are also formed using the disjunctive kóó which occurs in-between the alternative in question. I thus propose that polar questions are truncated alternative questions. The formation of content questions involves both in-situ and ex-situ strategies. In the former the question words are in their base positions while in the latter, they are moved to the pre-sentential position together with the introduction of focus markers nέ, and rέ suggesting that movement of question words is really a case of focus movement. Using the Minimalist Theory I propose that in-situ strategy literally means that the uninterpretable features are weak while the ex-situ indicates that they are strong. Data was gathered from five speech communities of Paasaal. Key words: questions, focus markers, feature checking, Gur, Sɩsaalɩ