2024-06-132024-06-132023Lovick, Olga. 2023. “Questions and requests in North American Languages.” In Carmen Jany, Marianne Mithun and Keren Rice (eds.), The languages and linguistics of North America, 267–288. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.https://hdl.handle.net/10388/15762Questions and requests are speech acts that call upon the hearer to do something. Questions typically ask for a verbal response, while requests usually elicit a non-verbal response. Both are important in language teaching and often among the first expressions that a learner acquires. Questions fall into two groups: polar questions, which can be answered with “yes” or “no”; and content questions, which require a more elaborate answer. Depending on the language, there are different types of requests, depending on factors such as identity of the addressee, politeness, etc. This paper provides an overview over the formation of different types of questions and requests in Indigenous languages of North America. Common strategies include intonation, (verbal) inflection or special markers. The paper closes with a brief discussion of how questions and requests can be used instead of one another.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 CanadaBook chapterhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110600926-012