Interrogative Verbs in Takic

A Google Scholar search for "interrogative verbs" brings up mostly references to verbs of asking, verbs with interrogative affixes, or verbs used in questions. A number of languages, however, have special verbs that include a semantic wh element in addition to their more typical question words. Verbs like this have not been extensively described, although Hagège (2003, 2008) suggests they are more common than most linguists realize: "Interrogative verbs," he writes, "can teach us many interesting things about certain relatively hidden, or unheeded, properties of language" (2008: 38). Hagège's broad survey turned up 28 languages with verbs of this type, including four from different North American indigenous language families. In this paper I'll consider interrogative verbs in four languages from the Takic subfamily of Uto-Aztecan (all from Southern California), which is unrelated to the languages surveyed by Hagège. I begin by explaining (in section 1) what interrogative verbs are (and are not), using non-Takic examples, and then I'll describe the interrogative verbs in the Cupan and Gabrielino/Tongva/Fernandeño branches of Takic (in section 2). In section 3 I consider briefly some of the typological and theoretical implications of such verbs .