Non-human animates and non-selective interrogative pronominals

In this paper, I examine the cross-linguistic variation in the use of non-selective interrogative pronominals, such as English who? and what?, in questions about nonhuman animates, i.e. non-human biologically living entities. For purposes of crosslinguistic comparison, I define the non-selective interrogative pronominals ‘who?’ and ‘what?’ as idealizations resulting out of the interaction between several parameters (viz. entity type, type of reference, and expected answer) within a single conceptual space. Thus, the prototypical interrogative ‘who?’ is an interrogative pronominal asking for the identification of a person and expecting a proper name as an answer. The prototypical interrogative ‘what?’ is an interrogative pronominal asking for the classification of a thing and expecting a common noun as an answer. The opposition between humans and things involved in this typology is also of paramount importance for the so-called animacy hierarchy. Non-human animates occupy an intermediate position on the animacy hierarchy, but with respect to this typology, most languages, like English, treat them as things by selecting the interrogative ‘what?’ in questions about them. Only a small minority of languages has been found to assimilate non-human animates to humans by selecting ‘who?’, as in (1) from Russian.