Abstract
When a wh-word and the kakari particle marking questions coexist in a single sentence, it is not clear which makes the sentence interrogative. In this paper, I propose that in the Aza-Irabu dialect it is not the wh-word but the kakari particle ga that determines the sentence type. In this dialect, while the distribution of the kakari particle ga agrees with that of the wh-word in the unembedded context, the use of the former is more restricted than that of the latter in embedded questions: ga can only appear in an embedded clause whose answer the speaker or the subject is uncertain of. Given the speaker/subject’s uncertainty as the definition of interrogatives, it is concluded that the kakari particle ga determines the sentence type. There are, however, some speakers of other varieties of Miyakoan who have lost this function of the kakari particle. This means that the decline of kakari-musubi proceeds from the loss of morphological concordance to the loss of the function of determining the sentence type.
