Detail #163: Interrogative Pronouns from Verbs

Imagine verbs with the rather specific meaning of 'to ask about the location of +OBJ', 'to ask about the manner of +OBJ', etc. Now, for whatever reason, these verbs are widely used in certain registers out of some deference-strategy where it's preferable to frame your question using a certain mood if asking your superior. This is then generalized, so that these verbs are widely used.

Now, instead of

where is the parrot(.nom)?

you get

may I [ask about the location of] the parrot(.acc)?

After a while, this turns into

[ask about the location of] the parrot.acc?

in whatever participle or infinitive or even finite form that the language happened to end up on. The interrogative word is reduced significantly, and we end up with a semantically bleached interrogative, which we'll know translate as 'where':

where (is) parrot.acc?

Suddenly, we've produced a split where intransitives where one side is an interrogative have accusative ~subjects. Now, in the transitive case we can envision different things having happened: the same strategy, and having this strategy somewhat ignore the roles of previous nouns, or we could have something like this:

may I [ask about the location of] his seeing the parrot.acc?

Possibly leading to an ergative pattern whenever interrogatives are present? However, we could also have the pattern differ between transitive and intransitive verbs, so that the transitivity of the verb forces the usual case marking onto the constituents, whereas intransitive verbs just get a tad odd.