#interrogatives

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.

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‘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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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?

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.

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! 

Title: Cogito ergo WC: 800

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

Title: Concoct WC: 900

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

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.