ABSTRACT
Polar and alternative questions have received relatively little attention in the robust literature concerned with questions in Indic languages (Mahajan 1990; Dayal 1994; Simpson and Bhattacharya 2003; Manetta 2010; Slade 2012; Bhatt and Dayal 2014). Due to the presence of two distinct overt morphological question markers, polar and alternative questions in the verb-second language Kashmiri have the potential to resolve several mysteries concerning the fine structure of its rich left periphery. Further, the facts in Kashmiri contribute more broadly to the wider research program on the whether/Q operator and its morphological spellout (Larson 1985; Schwarz 1999; Han and Romero 2004; Beck and Kim 2006; Den Dikken 2006; Cable 2010). The account presented here argues for an approach to verb-second in Kashmiri (following Manetta 2010), in which the second position verb is always found in C regardless of clause type. The research presented in this chapter interrogates the relationship between functional heads and phrases on the left periphery and asks what the robust left periphery of Kashmiri tells us about its finer structure.
