If you’re going to ask a question in English, you can do with various means, various syntactic
means. You can say “are you going”, you can say “You’re going?”, or you can
even do it nonverbally: in the right context, you can just raise your eyebrows, make a gesture,
and that constitutes a question. But there is a certain syntax which is conventionally
associated with questions. That is to say, there’s a clause type which seems to be
associated with that speech act, and the clause type is the interrogative clause type.
Interrogatives can be cross-classified in various ways in English. If we look only at
root clauses, we can distinguish between two main types of interrogatives. That is, wh-interrogatives
and polar interrogatives.
Polar interrogatives, or yes/no questions, are questions which can, at least in principle,
ben answered yes or no. So examples of the polar interrogative are things like “are
you going?”, “is he coming?”.
Wh-interrogatives, on the other hand, are examples like “who is coming?” “what
did she see?” “where did he go?” “how did you do that?” In this case, the nature
of the answer expected is indicated by a phrase that occurs at the beginning of the question,
which usually includes a wh-word, like ‘what’ or ‘where’. ‘How’ counts as a wh-word
even though it doesn’t have the phonology or the spelling.
Wh-interrogatives are introduced either by a special word like ‘what’ or ‘where’
or ‘who’ or ‘when’ or ‘how’, or by a phrase that includes that word. That
is to say, a phrase that includes a wh-word, like ‘which books’ or ‘what place’
or ‘how many books’. Interrogatives can also occur in embedded contexts, in the complement
to different kinds of heads. Most commonly, perhaps, as the complements of verbs, but
they can also occur as the complements of adjectives, of prepositions and of nouns.
This is true both for polar interrogatives, in which case they’ll be introduced either
by whether or if. It’s also possible to have embedded wh-interrogatives, which can
be introduced by the same wh-phrases that you find in root questions.
There are various questions about the syntax of these interrogatives. Where is the wh-phrase
in these questions? Where is the auxiliary in these questions, exactly? What is the source
of the difference between root interrogatives and embedded interrogatives? And we’re going
to look at some of those questions about questions.
In English, both root and embedded wh-interrogatives begin with a wh-phrase, and that, in fact,
is contrary to the typical order of the sentence in English, which is a classic SVO language.
In root clauses, there’s also something going on with the auxiliary. So, in fact the
simplest case, the one we’ll start with, is looking at embedded interrogatives. If
you look at the contrast between an embedded declarative like “I think that they will
eat lentils for dinner” and an embedded interrogative, like “I wonder what they
will eat for dinner”, we notice two things about the interrogative.
One is that the embedded clause is introduced by this wh-word ‘what’, and the other
is that the verb in that clause doesn’t have a noun phrase following it. That’s
surprising, because ‘eat’ normally is followed by a complement. It’s a transitive
verb.
What we see then, is that the selectional requirement of ‘eat’, that it be followed-
that it take a complement, and the thematic role that it normally assigns to its complement,
seem to be, these seem to be satisfied instead by this wh-phrase, which nevertheless, is
not in the correct position. It’s not where you’d expect it to be, given what we know
about selection and given what we know about thematic role assignment. So in that sense,
the wh-phrase seems to be displaced with respect to what we know about these two phenomena:
selection and theta-role assignment.
We find exactly the same kind of phenomenon if we look instead at agreement. So, we know
that normally a verb agrees with something which is very local to it. A finite verb agrees
with a subject, normally to its immediate left. So for instance, we could say “I believe
that he has said that twenty women have left.” So we get ‘has’ agreeing with ‘he’
and ‘have’ agreeing with twenty women. But notice in the interrogative, you could
say something like “I wonder how many women he has said have left” and that’s the
only possible agreement to get there. So again we find we have plural agreement on have,
but in this case it doesn’t seem to be local. The element that it’s agreeing with, the
plural women, isn’t immediately to its left, it’s much further away. So again, a wh-phrase
is behaving as though it were in a different position to the position where we actually
find it. It behaves as though it’s further down in the structure.
We might wonder whether all we need to do to account for this phenomenon in interrogatives
is just to come up with an additional structure for sentences which says that, well sometimes
the object can appear after the verb, and sometimes the object can appear at the beginning
of the sentence. We might think that we can deal with this strange position of the object
just by coming up with an alternative structure for sentences, so we could say that English
is sometimes SVO and sometimes OSV, but that isn’t going to actually account for what
we find. In particular, what we notice is that the questioned object doesn’t necessarily
appear at the beginning of its own clause, as it were. It can appear arbitrarily far
away from the verb which licenses it, the verb which assigns it a thematic role, or
the verb with which it agrees. So, for example, we’ll get not only “I wonder who he admires”
but “I wonder who they say he admires” or “I wonder who she thinks they say he
admires”. So the distance between the ‘who’ and ‘admires’, the verb which assigns
it a thematic role, and which requires it as a complement, can be arbitrarily large,
and we find exactly the same phenomenon with agreement, so we find alongside “I wonder
how many workers are on strike” cases like “I wonder how many workers he thinks are
on strike” or “I wonder how many workers they say he thinks are on strike”.
We’ve seen before a scenario where a phrase behaves in some respects as though it were
in two positions: the position in which you hear it, and the position in which it satisfies
some sort of syntactic requirements. That’s exactly what we saw in the case of subjects.