Decorative image of a mouse walking on a path, playing a stringed instrument
Conlang Year, Day 198 prompt

Goal: Write an introduction to wh-word questions

Note: Focus this section on strategies for questioning NP elements.

Tip: Include examples that question NPs in a variety of clausal positions.

Work focus: Solidify/Write/Share


Start writing a section on wh-word questions in your language documentation, focusing on the strategies you’ve created for questioning noun phrase elements. Include example questions that target information in noun phrases that occur in a variety of clausal positions, such as targeting a subject, an object, and an object of an adposition. 

You can use the same strategy from earlier brainstorms, where you take a single declarative clause and then focus on questioning different NP elements to highlight how your language’s nominal wh-words work and how they interact with other inflectional systems, such as case-marking. 

For instance, you can take a sentence like “A mouse made a nest in my garden” and create the following related questions based on it:

  • Who/what made a nest in my garden?
  • What did the mouse make in my garden?
  • What did the mouse make a nest in?
  • Which/what mouse made a nest in my garden?
  • Whose garden did the mouse make a nest in?

Not only does a strategy like this make it easier to come up with a set of examples, but it helps to guarantee you remember to provide examples for ways wh-words interact with a variety of inflections in your conlang.

You will add to this section later after you work on creating more wh-question strategies that go beyond questioning nominal elements.