#interrogatives

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 74: Who questions the questions?

We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to confirm social understanding (what a game, eh), and for stylistic effect, such as ironic or rhetorical questions (who knows!).

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about questions! We talk about question intonations from the classic rising pitch? to the British downstep (not a dance move...yet), and their written correlates, such as omitting a question mark in order to show that a question is rhetorical or intensified. We also talk about grammatical strategies for forming questions, from the common (like question particles and tag questions in so many languages), to the labyrinthine history that brings us English’s very uncommon use of “do” in questions. Plus: the English-centrically-named wh-word questions (like who, what, where), why we could maybe call them kw-word questions instead (at least for Indo-European), and why we don’t need to stress out as much about asking “open” questions.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

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Take our listener survey here!

‘British intonation: Meghan teaches us’ post from English Speech Services

‘Question–response sequences in conversation across ten languages: An introduction’ Editorial, Journal of Pragmatics

Wikipedia entry for question grammar in Modern Standard Chinese

WALS entry for Polar Questions

All Things Linguistic post on tag questions

Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America entry on Canadian Eh

Liz Stokoe Twitter thread on open-ended questions

Lingthusiasm episode ‘Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta’

Confirmation or Elaboration: What Do Yes/No Declaratives Want? by Lucan M. Seuren & Mike Huiskes

Dariusz Galasiński blog post on open questions

Superlinguo post ‘New Publication: Questions and answers in Lamjung Yolmo’

Lingthusiasm episode ‘You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality’

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[an-american-in-norway]

Generally, Norwegian and English use the same type of question-words:

Hvem er du? Who are you?

Hva er det? What is it?

Når kommer du? When are you coming?

Hvor bor du? Where do you live?

Hvordan staver du det? How do you spell it?

Hvorfor spør du? Why do you ask?

Hvilken bus må vi ta? Which bus do we need to take?

But some require a bit of extra explanation:

Hvilken? Which?

inflected according to the noun it precedes

Masculine/feminine

Hvilken by kommer du fra? Which town are you from? Hvilken klokke er riktig? Which clock is right?

Neuter

Hvilket land kommer du fra? Which country do you come from?

Plural

Hvilke oppgaver skal vi gjøre? Which exercises should we do?

Hvem? Who?

has no inflection, if there is a preposition in the question, it usually comes at the end of the sentence

Hvem bor her? Who lives here? Hvem bor hun sammen med? Who does she live with? Hvem ga du den til? Who did you give it to?

In practice, Norwegian lacks an equivalent of whose. The word hvis was used in that sense in the past, but now it's used in this sense only rarely, and in extremely formal texts. To avoid the problem, the sentence is usually altered in such a way that one can use hvem instead:

Hvem er han sønn til? Whose son is he? Hvem fikk den ideen? Whose idea was that?

Hvem sin/ hvem sitt/ hvem sine is also a possible option:

Hvem sin bil er dette? Whose car is this? Hvem sitt kort er dette? Whose card is this? Hvem sine bøker er dette? Whose books are these?

Hvordan? How?

generally translated into how in English, but not always:

Hvordan har du det? How are you? Hvordan er de? What are they like? Hvordan så han ut? What did he look like?

Hvor + adverb/adjective/quantifier

Hvor mye koster denne? How much does this cost? Hvor mange rom er det i huset? How many rooms are there in the house? Hvor lenge har du vært her? How long have you been here?

Adjectives must be inflected according to gender and number:

Hvor gammel er hun? How old is she? Hvor gammelt er huset? How old is the house? Hvor gamle er barna? How old are the children?

Source: Exploring Norwegian Grammar by Kirsti Mac Donald and Marianne MacDonald

[allthingslinguistic]

Geoff Pullum has a good mythbusting description of sentence types on the Lingua Franca blog. 

Grammar books, and hundreds of websites out there, are appallingly confused about statements, questions, orders, and exclamations. Most of the problem lies in their failure to distinguish syntax from semantics. I want to try and sort things out a bit, and provide a little homework exercise.

Clause type is syntactic, not semantic. It shouldn’t be confused with any element of meaning or use. Standard English has four clause types (five if you treat 2a and 2b as separate), differing with respect to which words you put where:

Declarative   Characteristic use: making statements. Example: He was polite. Key syntactic properties: subject precedes auxiliary and/or predicate.

Interrogative   Characteristic use: asking questions.

Closed interrogative: for expressing questions having a fixed, finite list of answers that the form of the question suggests. Example: Was he polite? Key syntactic properties: auxiliary before subject.

Open interrogative: for expressing questions having an unbounded range of answers. Example: How polite was he? Key syntactic properties: wh-phrase at beginning of clause; auxiliary before subject if wh-phrase is not the subject of its clause.

Imperative   Characteristic use: issuing directives about desired behavior by others. Example: Be polite. Key syntactic properties: plain form of verb; subject often missing.

Exclamative   Characteristic illocutionary force: making exclamatory statements. Example: How polite he was! Key syntactic properties: wh-phrase at beginning of clause (headed by either how or what); subject before auxiliary.

Crucially, the characteristically associated meanings are only a default. Using an interrogative (e.g., What’s your name?) is the stereotypical way to express a question, but declaratives can also in effect convey questions, through a combination of literal meaning and pragmatic implication:

I want to know your name. I’m asking you to tell me your name.

Imperatives, too, can be used to convey the effect of questions:

Tell me your name. Tell me what your name is.

Even an exclamative can come pretty close to implying a question:

How I’d love to know what your name is.

Grammar books and grammar websites are particularly confused about exclamatives, which they often call “exclamatory sentences” (see the hopelessly confused page here for a random example). They imagine that any kind of sentence that might intuitively be used for exclaiming and/or ends with ‘!’ must belong, so they give examples like I can’t figure this out! (a declarative), or Out of my way! (not a clause at all).

Read the whole thing.

I’m a bit surprised that conditionals, subjunctives, counterfactuals and that whole set of commonly confused terms didn’t make the list, but perhaps that’s a topic for next week’s post. 

[lonelyfoxofthewoods]

Space werewolf.

So....if a werewolf becomes an astronaut...and,I don't know goes to another planet...let's say...with no moons....would it still be affected or something...because as I can tell the effect only applies when there's a full moon (monthly) aplying to anyone on Earth. But if you're in other planet,would it still be tied to the Earth's moon cycle or it would vanish and never happen again. And what about planeta with several moons,let's say 7 with different full moons stage (on Earth months) would it still be affected each time or only when on Earth is full moon? And what if out of those 7,3 are on full moon at the same time? Would that affect the werewolf? Would it make him more powerful or what? I'd love to know the answer to this,so if you know it,please tell me Ok,see you later.

[linguisticsbunker]

What?

Interrogatives! Or as my dear history teacher refers to them, “the five big W’s and the scrappy little H.” Today we’re going to be looking at the etymologies of our question words. 

As you may have noticed, in English and many other Indo-European languages, the interrogatives match. We have “who, what, when,” Spanish has “cuál, cuándo, qué,” Latin has “quis, quod, quid.” (Of course, in Irish and Welsh, they don’t match all, and there are verb forms that go with them and it’s all very confusing, but sorry, I only know four European languages, so the examples will just have to end there.) This convenient and pleasing alliteration is because all our interrogatives come from the same PIE (Proto-Indo-European) root. They’re very similar across most languages in this grouping. You may notice that if you say most the words I used as examples above, you will hear a “w” sound. (Both Latin “qu” and Spanish “cu” are essentially a “cw” sound.) The PIE root is kwo-, which even explains the “cw” sound in Spanish and Latin. The English words had farther to travel before they solidified, hence the loss of that “k” sound. The Old English versions did have an initial “h” sound, which is more like the “k”. (You think that h and k are separate letters, but say them before an w and they sound remarkably similar.) Therefore, the Old English interrogatives sounded more like “hwa” and “hwen.” This “h” sound was lost over the centuries as the “hw” sound fell out of use in English, although you can still see it in the spelling.  My history teacher’s favorite Old English interrogative is hwaet!, which could also be used as a greeting, or to mean something along the lines of “Hark!” This is how it is used in the first lines of Beowulf:

HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum, þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon! 

So there’s that. 

[pollylynn]

Title: Cogito ergo WC: 800

“And why do you think that is?” — Martha Rodgers, Undead Again (4 x 22)

He has a lot to think about. He has not been big on thinking these last few weeks, and apparently it’s like pile of laundry that you forgot you left heaped in the middle of the bed until you’re exhausted and would like nothing more than to get into said bed, but you can’t: There’s a pile of laundry heaped in the middle of it. The things he hasn’t been thinking about are almost exactly like that. 

Some of them are things he was destined to kick down the road until he ran out of road. His kid’s impending decision, and the obvious truth that she’s intent on not just leaving the nest, but launching herself as far from it as possible. In every version of the multiverse, that’s a thing he was not going to think about, only now he has to think about the fact that he’s left her to face all that alone. 

He’s been so obviously fragile and empty-headed, so obviously in denial, that she’s been suffering through it all without the person who’s always promised he’d be with her in everything. He has to think about the ways he’s let her down and the worry that he’ll live with from now on that the sick feeling she’s had about Oxford, about Stanford, have been about what he needs, not what she wants. 

He has to think about the things his mother has been trying to tell him for weeks. He has to sit with the one thing—the one—that  had somehow, finally pierced the carapace he’d constructed around himself. If you want to punish Beckett . . . 

He has to think long and hard about that. 

He had wanted to punish her. Punishing her has been high up on his wish list since the bombing case. He’s wanted to punish her with his absence, then punish her with his presence, absence, presence, absence. He has wanted her to have to worry about when he’d show up, who he’d show up with, what nonsense he might pull. He has wanted her to feel unsteady and unsure of him. He has to think about the fact that the epiphany with his mother was more than a little manufactured, because of course he had wanted to punish her. 

He has to think about the fact that has believed—he has held the truth in the center of his mind—that he couldn’t punish her. He has believed that he’d been mistaken in thinking that he had any power whatsoever to do that, and a hot-off-the-presses thing to think about is how pathetic that makes him—how desperate and sub–John Hughes everything with Jacinda, everything with Slaughter, everything with making himself unpredictably scarce and chaotically present.

But what he has to think about most is the fact that he has punished her. He has that power and he has wielded it in such harmful, painful ways. He has to think about the fact that she is not innocent here—she’d punished him for months after her shooting, and she has hurt him by dealing allusions and subtext and sins of omission—but he doesn’t care. 

It’s the strangest of the things he has to think about. He does not care about whatever culpability she bears for their estrangement. He is hurt, he is angry, his faith in her is badly bruised, and he still wishes fervently that he hadn’t tried to punish her. He wishes fervently that he had not succeeded. 

He takes her bravery for granted. That’s another thing to think about. He is all in when it comes to the stoic, badass persona she inhabits on the job. He would collect her action figure, if in fact the action figures she so richly deserves were a thing in the real world. He has seen her stare down, disarm, take down the fools who underestimate her at their own peril. He has witnessed her wading into the most heartbreaking, most baffling, most desolate and emotional situations without so much as a muscle twitch that might convey anxiety, weakness, impatience.

From here into eternity, he will have to think about the moment she showed him exactly how brave she is not sometimes, exactly how brave she believes she has failed to be these last few months. And yet she has been in therapy. All this time she has been in therapy, working on that wall in isolation because that’s who she is, because he told her when he came back that he was still mad, because she is dumb and stubborn and unthinking sometimes. 

And she probably has a metaphorical pile of laundry heaped in the middle of her bed, just like he does. She’s probably had that there for months, just like he has. 

A/N: I defy anyone to argue that thinking is a thing in the year of our lizard, 2020

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

Title: Concoct WC: 900

“Oh, um . . . funny story?” — Kevin Ryan, Heartberak Hotel (4 x 08)

Kevin Ryan is a happy drunk—a happy talkative drunk. It’s confusing the X Club, staff and clientele alike, prodigiously. 

“I peeked,” Ryan says in the world’s loudest stage whisper. “I know it’s bad luck, but I had to know, you know? You know?” 

The drop-dead gorgeous brunette who has been charged with seeing to their table’s needs smiles and murmurs that she does know. She casts a slightly desperate look in Castle’s direction. He tugs Ryan’s sleeve in a vain attempt to redirect his happy, talkative attention. The brunette seizes the opportunity to make a break for it. 

She practically sprints down the steps leading to their high, semi-private booth, and he wonders what it’s like to be a seasoned professional, to have kept her composure through scenes he can hardly imagine, only to be broken by the little man who packed a sweater vest for a jaunt to Atlantic City. 

“Let me guess,” Esposito the not happy, not talkative drunk grumbles. “It’s white?” 

Castle shakes his head, not that Esposito notices. Esposito’s attention is fixed on the bottom of his drink. He’s drunk—they’re all drunk—but that’s no excuse for pushing the wedding button. But Esposito has pushed the wedding button. He has jammed his thumb down on it, and the gentlemen in the booth to their left don’t seem to find it enhances the private dance they’re trying to enjoy. 

There’s some grumbling around the edge of their booths’ shared high back. There’s some posturing from Esposito who also seems to be the kind of drunk who’s always spoiling for a fight, but he’s derailed by the incidental music of Ryan trying to describe fabric and folds and bodices and beadwork, when he is clearly only rated for describing sweater vests. 

The tension dissipates without incident, though. The dancers’ efforts to redirect the men’s attention are not in vain, and it’s back to the three of them—a happy, talkative drunk,  a not happy, not talkative drunk, and him. 

He’s not sure what kind of a drunk he is tonight. He’s not so drunk, for one thing. He is keeping-company drunk. He is glad-to-be-here drunk. But he’s also keeping-an-eye-out not so drunk, because that’s the job she had wordlessly tasked him with as she held the top of the driver’s side door on her Crown Vic and peered over it to fix him with a look. Keep an eye out, that look had said, and his nod had assured her that he would. 

And so he is. He’s doing more sipping than quaffing. He’s redirecting attention and conversation when Esposito is inclined to be morose about Lanie. He’s palming phones off the table top when it seems as if drunk dialing—or at least drunk texting—is a possibility and everyone at the table who isn’t him could use a better angel to carry him through those unfortunate moments. 

“It’s ruined,” he hears Esposito  say, and he tunes back int o the conversation. He tunes back in to the close to home action, rather than letting his thoughts linger on that look, that sacred charge to keep an eye out for her boys. 

“Ruined!” 

It’s not Esposito saying it. It wasn’t Esposito in the first place, though he understands his own mistake. Esposito has been positively goth, conversationally speaking, so naturally a melodramatic cry of Ruined! must have come from him. Except it hasn’t. 

Ryan’s hand meets the surface of the table with force. The happy, talkative member of their merry band has taken a turn for the morose. “You weren’t supposed to break up!” 

“You think it was my idea?” Esposito, unexpectedly, looks more pained than angry, so go ahead and hang that on the wall of weird. “You think I wanted to break up?”

“We were gonna have married dates,” Ryan’s head lolls back as he tries to tell the server of this tragedy. “All four of us.” He gestures around the table, and maybe it’s math. Maybe Kevin Ryan  is just a sweater-vested genius. “You’re four of us.” His spine jerks him upright. “You and Beckett, Castle.” He’s trying to clarify, but his words are slurring. He leans in and wraps one hand around Castle’s wrist. A contagious wave of happy crashes over the two of them.  “You and Beckett will get all married and we’ll go on married dates. All four!” 

It’s genius, really. It’s crystal clear genius, in his not-so-drunk opinion, But Esposito, who is definitely drunk, is not impressed. Drunk Esposito has lots to say about being iced out of everything. But Ryan is content to believe he’s hit on the perfect solution. He is happy to expound on the Married Date Plan to any and all booth neighbors and passers by. If Castle would let him go to the bathroom alone, he’d no doubt expound to the attendants there, handing out mints. 

Castle can’t be bothered to follow the details of Ryan’s argument for this, in their new Married-Date utopia. He is  too busy manhandling a pile of phones, and it seems like there are more than three. He manhandles them until he finds his own. He fires off a text. It’s not a drunk text. He’s not so drunk, but she has to know this. She has to.

Drunk Ryan has the best ideas.  

A/N: Drunk texting, Happy, Mad, Not So Drunk, Not. A. Thing. 

images via homeofthenutty

[synsemuca]

Presentation: Monday, May 6 - Deniz Özyıldız “Descriptions of mental states and events”

Our speaker will be Deniz Özyıldız from the University of Konstanz)

Abstract:

Verbs that combine with clauses differ in whether or not they can combine with interrogatives. An often cited contrast is the one between "know" and "think" in (1). (1) Leah knows/#thinks whether she should invite Raquel.

Many agree that "think" and its class-mates are unacceptable with interrogatives because they are neg-raising, which means that they license the inference in (2). (2) Leah doesn't think that she should invite Raquel. -> Leah thinks that she shouldn't invite Raquel. Some dissent, citing examples like (3): If we let "think" describe an event, e.g., by using the progressive, question embedding improves. And if the verb is acceptable with interrogatives, the question arises of what (if anything) the neg-raising-based explanation is an explanation of. (3) Leah is thinking whether she should invite Raquel. In this talk, I focus on contrasts like (1) and (3) to understand the effects of tense and aspect on clause embedding verbs' combinatorial and inferential profiles. I argue that their eventuality-related properties (stativity, eventivity, telicity, etc.) must be taken into account if we want to describe and explain their syntax and semantics. I sketch out a way of doing this that assumes that stative thought ascriptions are generic sentences built from eventive thought ascriptions. This allows us to derive intuitively accurate truth conditions for "think that" and "think wh-," derive the neg-raising inference, and better understand its relationship with question embedding.

The workshop will take place from 4pm to 6pm (CEST) over Zoom.