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
Description:
A THESIS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS, FACULTY
OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION,
SUBMITTED TO THE SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES, UNIVERSITY
OF EDUCATION, WINNEBA, IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD OF THE MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY
IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS DEGREE.
JULY, 2017