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Prepositional complement

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Prepositional objects feature a special interrogative pronoun if they are presupposed to be [<-person>]. This is the so-called R-pronounwêr what, which is homophonous with the locative pronoun. The interrogative paradigm is as follows:

Table 1

	[<+ person>]	[<-person>]
Subject or object	wa who	wat what
Prepositional complement	wa who	wêr where

Wa who as a complement of P behaves differently from the interrogative R-pronoun wêr what. Interrogative wa who is placed in first position of the clause together with its preposition:

Mei wa hasto praat?

with who have.you talked

Who did you talk with?

Wêr what, in contrast, must precede its preposition (as must all R-pronouns):

Wêr hasto oer praat?

what have.you about talked

What did you talk about?

Fronting wa who without its preposition causes a mild ungrammaticality, at most:

?Wa hasto mei praat?

who have.you with talked

Who did you talk with?

In case the wh-phrase is expanded, the sentence is grammatical:

Hokke keardels woe se net mei prate?

which guys wanted she not with talk

Which guys did not she want to talk with?

Non-interrogative Noun Phrases (NPs) may be freely separated from their preposition, although discourse factors, not discussed here, may affect the grammaticality of the resulting sentence:

Sokke keardels woe se net mei prate

such guys wanted she not with talk

Such guys, she did not want to talk with

Fronting wêr what together with its preposition causes a mild ungrammaticality, provided that the R-pronoun still precedes its preposition. If the preposition precedes the interrogative R-pronoun, the result is plainly ungrammatical: