Animacy in Interrogative Pronouns

The present paper presents a typological investigation of whether languages make an animacy distinction in their independent nominal interrogative pronouns. The data comprises 24 languages and was taken mainly from grammatical descriptions. 3rd person pronouns and relative pronouns are included for comparison. The outcome of the survey is that the vast majority of the sample languages do make a ‘who’ vs. ‘what’ distinction. Constructions special to questions, in particular fronting and its possible implications for the question words, are discussed, as is the role of case marking on interrogative pronouns.Animacy in Typolog