Embedded Questions and Concealed Relative Questions in Hausa and Akan

Abstract

The central goal of this paper is to instigate cross-linguistic research on the interpretation of embedded interrogatives and concealed relative clauses. The empirical focus is on the West African languages Hausa and Akan, which prominently employ relativized DPs for expressing embedded questions. The paper first discusses the different ways for interpreting and analyzing embedded wh-interrogatives: interpretations vary from strong exhaustive via intermediate and weak exhaustive to non-exhaustive. We will then present data on concealed relative questions in Hausa and Akan, focusing on the issues of how such structures are compositionally interpreted, and how they behave in terms of (non-) exhaustivity. Drawing on existing analyses of concealed and interrogative questions in English, we tentatively propose two formal analyses for concealed relative questions in the two languages discussed.