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Abstract:

In situ wh-interrogatives like (1)--(6) have received short shrift in the syntactic and semantic literature, either dismissed summarily as `metalinguistic' and not genuine questions (see Cooper 1983, Engdahl 1986, Haegeman 1991, Hornstein 1995), or else assumed to involve an intrinsically different logical form (Janda 1985).

(1) A: Sandy loves barack palinka.
    B: Sandy loves WHAT?
(2) A: Give me some gulab jamun.
    B: Give you some WHAT?
(3) A: I'm annoyed.
    B: Aha. You're annoyed with whom?
(4) A: We're going to buy a house.
    B: Uh huh. And you're going to pay for it with what?
(5) Lester: I've been working here for 14 years. You've been here for how
    long? A month? [American Beauty]
(6) Michael Krasny [addressing a guest---who has not said 
    anything yet---about the interim chief of the US Attorney's office]:
    This is a position that is how important in your judgment, Rory? 
    [Forum KQED---July 29, 1998]

Note that examples like (4)--(6) have no straightforward analysis as reprises of the prior utterance.

Our basic claim is that a reprise interrogative (including `echo' and `ref' uses) is metalinguistic only in that the meaning that it gives rise to contains as a constituent the illocutionary force of the (previous) utterance that it reprises. Beyond that, we claim, there is nothing fundamentally different going on---syntactically or semantically---from other uses of
interrogatives. We also argue, in light of examples like (4)--(6) that not all in situ interrogatives are reprises.

We develop an account of both reprising and non-reprising uses of in situ questions that incorporates a uniform treatment of wh-expressions, one stated in terms of stored parameters that are abstracted over in forming a question that serves as the content of a superordinate phrase.  Our analysis is construction-based, using constraint inheritance to express the common properties of construction families, e.g. wh-interrogatives, wh-relatives,
wh-exclamatives, and so-called `topicalized' sentences.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

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