Proto-Austronesian Interrogative Pronouns and Their Development

This paper reconstructs forms for Proto-Austronesian (PAn) ‘who’ and ‘what’ from which the corresponding interrogative pronouns found across Formosan languages can be straightforwardly derived. One key aspect of these reconstructions is that PAn interrogative pronouns consisted of an operator attached to an indefinite base. This shows PAn interrogative pronouns to belong to a consistent morphological paradigm, as well as to be interpreted in terms of an operator–variable configuration, as is true of wh-words cross linguistically. Another fundamental characteristic of my reconstructions is the division of interrogative pronouns into two semantic classes determined by the operators. The operator in the case of ‘who’ was a determiner and created a category construed with sets of individuals, while the operator creating ‘what’ resulted in a form construed with sets of properties, a commonly found typological distinction between ‘who’ and ‘what’. The diverse array of forms found in Formosan languages can then be accounted for in terms of renewal of these word-internal operators from case markers in response to the opacity in the earlier composition induced by phonological and morphosyntactic changes taking place in the respective languages.