The polyfunctionality of which in Övdalian

Abstract

The Övdalian wh-word ukin has a variety of syntactic uses, spanning from the canonical use as personal pronoun (‘who’) to predicative property querying item (‘what ... like’) and polarity item introducing both main and embedded clauses. In this paper the various uses will be described and discussed, and it will be argued that the polyfunctionality of ukin can be well understood on the background of wh-syncretisms in other North Germanic varieties which all point in the direction of principled grammaticalization patterns in this domain. The pattern found will be accounted for by a nanosyntactic approach to lexicalization ranges.