Ikpana Interrogatives

Abstract

This book documents the interrogative system of Ikpana, an endangered indigenous Ghana-Togo Mountain language of eastern Ghana also known as Logba. The system is notable is several respects. It exhibits features that: 1) buck certain typological trends, 2) act as counterexamples to certain claims about language universals, and 3) exemplify fascinating patterns that are either rare or unfamiliar in interrogative systems crosslinguistically. The book provides a theoretically informed description and analysis of Ikpana interrogative grammar, encompassing both syntactic and phonological aspects of question formation in the language, including intonation and prosody, drawing on original fieldwork and a combination of formal/theoretical and experimental methodologies. Our coverage includes the following phenomena: polar questions; wh- questions; wh- movement; partial wh- movement; wh- in situ; indirect questions; multiple wh- questions; and superiority, intervention, and island effects, among others. Over the course of the book, we demonstrate the value of documenting aspects of a language with theoretical considerations in mind by showing that theoretically guided language documentation has the potential to not only make significant contributions to language description, uncovering the existence of gaps in the documentary record of a language, but also the ability to grow our understanding of the human language faculty and expand the empirical base of our language typologies. We argue that by bringing formal/theoretical concerns to the fore when documenting a language, we can reach richer descriptions of the grammar in ways that would have been impossible if the task had been approached from a purely descriptive perspective.