'What's your name?' in Tungusic and beyond

• Main Author: Andreas Hölzl
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Language Science Press 2022
• Subjects: personal name question; typology; Tungusic; reconstruction; frames; construction grammar; Tungusic languages
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7053365

This study investigates questions about personal names, i.e. questions correspond- ing to What’s your name? in English. This potentially universal type of question is referred to as the personal name question (PNQ). The study sketches the typological variation found in the PNQ from a cross-linguistic perspective and analyzes the synchronic typology and diachronic development of the PNQ in Tungusic, a small but important language family spoken in Northeast Asia. Cross-linguistically, two main types of PNQs are attested. Type A is an equational copula sentence (e.g., What is your name?) while Type B contains a speech act verb (e.g., What are you called?). Tungusic shows a tendency for Type A but, because of contact languages such as Mongolian and Russian, also has instances of Type B. One of several other dimensions of variation among the world’s languages is the kind of interrogative used in PNQs. Tungusic languages originally used an interrogative meaning ‘who’ (literally Who is your name?). The use of ‘what’ in several languages located in the south and of ‘how’ in many languages in the north can be attributed to influence from Chinese, Russian, and other languages. Historical accounts of Tungusic are usually restricted to individual items (e.g., *si ‘you (sg)’ *gärbü ‘name’, *ŋüi ‘who’, e.g. Benzing 1956), but rarely are larger expressions reconstructed to Proto-Tungusic. This study shows that the Proto-Tungusic PNQ as one idiom can be plausibly reconstructed as *si(n-i) gärbü-si ŋüi? ‘2sg(.obl-gen) name-2sg.poss who’. Most deviations in modern languages can be explained by contact with surrounding languages.