Marshallese Questions and Remnant Movement, Willson 1 MARSHALLESE YES/NO QUESTIONS AND REMNANT MOVEMENT

This paper concerns the structure of Marshallese yes/no questions, which are formed through the use of the question particle ke. Ke does not occur sentence initially but may occur in a number of positions following the tense/aspect/modality marker. In negative questions, ke must occur sentence finally. I argue that ke is the head of the interrogative phrase and that its position in a sentence results from movement of phrasal elements into the left periphery to the specifier of a focus phrase, followed by movement of the remnant subject agreement phrase to the specifier position of a topic phrase above the interrogative phrase. This analysis is supported by the fact that it can explain the constituency of Marshallese interrogatives and ke's sentence final position in negative questions yes/no questions. 1. INTRODUCTION1 In this paper, I discuss Marshallese yes/no question structure.2 Marshallese forms yes/no questions through the use of the question particle ke. However the position of the question particle differs from other Austronesian languages in that it has a relatively free distribution an