Question-Answer Coordination as an Answering Strategy in South Caucasian

Abstract

In Colloquial Georgian, Svan, and Megrelian (South Caucasian; Georgia), to answer a wh-question, one can use the coordination of the entire question (or, more frequently, its sluiced version) with the answer.

(1)   Q: Who caught the bird?

      A: Who (caught the bird) and me. = ‘Me’

Polar or alternative questions do not allow this type of an answer. This construction has not been addressed so far in the literature, and appears to be a typological rarum. The theoretical puzzles that it raises are the apparent coordination of a question with a declarative, and the restriction to wh-questions. We describe properties of this construction and make first steps towards its analysis.

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