tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Dec 02 09:59:57 1996
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Embedded wh-questions
- From: "d'Armond Speers" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Embedded wh-questions
- Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1996 13:01:32 -0500
- Encoding: 38 TEXT
There's a question that's been gnawing at me for a while...
In English (by way of example), when we question something in an embedded
clause, the thing which is questioned is moved up to the main clause (we
linguists call it the "matrix" clause). For example,
John likes Mary.
Who does John like?
I think that John likes Mary.
Who do I think that John likes?
and, specifically, not
* I think that who does John like?
Now, in Klingon. Let's say, the officer hits the child.
puq qIp yaS.
Who does the officer hit?"
'Iv qIp yaS?
"I think that the officer hit the child." (And we can argue about
"Klingon"-sounding this syntax is):
puq qIp yaS 'e' vIQub
Now, what I'm wondering is, how do we say, "who do you think the officer
hit?"
'Iv qIp yaS 'e' DaQub?
This doesn't feel right to me. It doesn't feel like we're questioning the
matrix clause here. It feels more like "Who did the officer hit? You
think that." Other attempts by my mind to twist this into a more
reasonable form (semantically) fail syntactically.