| 总结: | In the Camuno dialect of northern Italy, ‘do’-support may be used to form the interrogative. In some varieties, this is optional, and it co-exists with the alternative interrogative method of using the main verb alone. Through an elicitation experiment, participants produced their preferred version of a question based on a certain main verb with given context. The likelihood that ‘do’-support was used varied according to the supported verb's semantics and the context pragmatics, specifically: (a) the degree to which the verb denotes activity (directly or indirectly); and (b) the role of the subject as an effector, or ‘do’-er of that activity. Unlike for ‘do’-support in English, a purely syntactic function does not seem relevant for Camuno ‘do’. The study shows that: (1) even if, syntactically, the support verb resembles an auxiliary, it may have full lexical content; and (2) that there exists a credible grammaticalisation pathway from a lexical ‘do’ verb to a semantically bleached, contentless ‘do’, seemingly motivated by a social preference for the ‘do’-support construction and a desire to simplify the interrogative system.
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