Voprosy Jazykoznanija

Over the past half century, the analysis of questions has played an important role in the development of the syntactic theory. Despite this, echo questions have been given quite little attention, and most studies on echo questions focused on data from a single language. In this paper, I review strategies of forming echo questions of different types in 32 languages from five macroareas. For this purpose, I used a series of descriptive grammars based on Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire designed by Comrie and Smith (1977). I consider an echo question an instance of reported speech but with interrogative illocutionary force and define a derivation strategy as a set of features by which the echo question differs from the stimulus sentence. Each strategy is a combination of the following parameters: 1) the marking of the sentence part that signals quotation (M-part); 2) the marking of an interrogative semantic component; 3) the presence or absence of the pronominal deictic shift. An M-part can be a clause, while the part with the reported content (R-part) can be formally dependent or independent from it. An M-part can also be an affix, clitic, particle or remain unexpressed. An interrogative semantic component is usually expressed by intonation, an interrogative affix, clitic, particle, or pronoun. Among the languages of my sample, the most frequent strategies of forming echo questions are those in which the M-part is not expressed.

The paper deals with the syntax of the conjunction da in North Russian dialects in a cross-linguistic perspective and offers a unitary account of its various usages (proclitic, enclitic as well as reduplication) in the formal framework. The paper demonstrates that dialectal data provides intriguing evidence for understanding the second position constraint. Namely, it features cross-linguistically rare variation of reduplication and metathesis as two realizations of the same post-syntactic process.

The description of Armenian grammar has a long history. Several decades after the creation of the Armenian alphabet by Mesrop Mashtots, in all probability in the late 5^th century, the Art of Grammar of Dionysius Thrax was translated from Greek, and 12 commentaries on it were written until the late 16^th century. This translation, which laid the foundation of Armenian grammatical terminology, and its commentaries artificially ascribed some features of Greek to Armenian. In the 1340s Yovhannēs wrote a different work entitled On Grammar, extant in a single manuscript copied in 1350. In 1333–1347 he was the head of the catholic monastery in Kʻṙna in the Armenian province Nakhijevan, founded by catholic missionaries sent to Eastern Armenia by the pope and their Armenian cooperators, the Fratres Unitores. The section on phonetics in this work is strongly influenced by the Armenian version of Dionysius, and the terms for parts of speech and many grammatical categories are borrowed from it. But Yovhannēs also used Latin sources and dedicated the two last sections of his work to syntax. He mentions the name of Priscian (6^th c.), and his work also has parallels with the commentaries on Priscian’s work, in particular, with Summa super Priscianum by Petrus Helias (12^th c.). He translated some phrases, mainly definitions, from these sources, distinguished between the substantives and the adjectives in the section “On the Noun”, described verbal tenses and voices in a more reliable way, introduced the notions and terms for the sentence and its varieties, for government, and mentioned grammatical agreement. Nevertheless, the work On Grammar also features the author’s independent observations. It is written in classical Grabar, but some examples are given in Middle Armenian.