tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Oct 29 07:08:16 1997
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Re: Questions as sentences
- From: [email protected] (Alan Anderson)
- Subject: Re: Questions as sentences
- Date: Wed, 29 Oct 97 09:43:29 EST
[peHruS: nuqDaq yuch Dapol 'e' luSovbe' puqpu'vetlh]
ja' charghwI':
>Your overall "compound sentence" is a statement, not a question.
>The "question" you are containing in your "compound sentence" is
>actually a relative clause representing a noun. What do the
>children not know? They don't know the place. What place? The
>place you keep the chocolate. The relative clause adds specifying
>detail to the noun which is the object of "know".
>
>THAT is what bothers me about this construction. In a REAL
>Sentence As Object construction, the whole sentence is the
>object, not just a noun from that sentence. In my example {jIbom
>'e' Sovbe' puqpu'vetlh,} the thing the children don't know is
>not a noun. The only noun there is me, and I'm not the object of
>"know". It is the combination of the subject and action of the
>verb - the whole sentence - that they don't know. That is
>Sentence As Object.
Thank you! You have cogently explained the reason for my not liking
this usage. It's apparently trying to use a single word (either the
question word itself or one word of the not-yet-given answer) as the
object of the second sentence, but it misuses {'e'} which applies to
the *entire* first sentence.
This explanation, with a little more detail and some explorations of
possible alternative interpretations, would probably be a good thing
to write up in HolQeD.
-- ghunchu'wI'