Embedded Inverted Interrogatives: Investigating Strong Islands in the

Acquisition of Questions

Rebecca Woods (University of York/UMass)

rlw523@york.ac.uk

UUSLAW Fall 2014, UMass

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Roadmap

• The phenomenon: embedded inverted interrogatives

• The analysis: Speech Act structure

• (Some) previous work on questions and questioning in children

• Pilot data

• Plans for future work

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Embedded inverted interrogatives

• Dialects include Irish English (McCloskey 1992, 2006), Belfast English (Henry 1995), African American English (Green 2002), Manchester/Liverpool English (Woods 2014) and New York English (Craig Sailor, p.c.)

• Key characteristic: subject-auxiliary inversion in embedded question contexts

– Only available in contexts in which a “true” question is possible, i.e. not under so-called rogative verbs such as know or find out

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Embedded inverted interrogatives

Polar or Wh-questions

1. I asked Jack was she in his class

2. I asked him from what source could the reprisals come

3. I’m sure she wasn’t far from the truth when she asked was he thinking of throwing her in

4. The baritone was asked what did he think of Mrs Kearney’s conduct

McCloskey 2006

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Embedded inverted interrogatives“True question”-selecting predicates

5. I wondered how did they get into the building

6. The policeman asked who had they beaten up

7. I enquired who might they hire

8. *I found out how did they get into the building

9. *The police discovered who had they beaten up

10.*I know who might they hireMcCloskey 2006

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Embedded inverted interrogatives

Modality in the matrix clause

Modals

11. I wanted to know could they do it for me

AAE; Green 2002, p.88

Negation

12. He didn’t know why did they come

Hiberno English; Berizzi 2010, p.85

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Embedded inverted interrogatives

Matrix clause type

Interrogative

13. Do we know how were words chosen for the lists?

Imperative

14. Remind me when are the CLS meetings?

New York English; Barbara Pearson, p.c.

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Embedded inverted interrogatives

A bit like indirect speech…

• Sequence of Tense holds

• Indexicals are evaluated w.r.t the utterance speaker, not the original speaker (no indexical shift)

• No “comma intonation”

• Can represent a potential speech act that hasn’t (yet) happened

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Embedded inverted interrogatives

A bit like direct speech…

• Subject-auxiliary inversion/do-support

• Adjunction of speech act adverbs, temporal adjuncts, topicalised constituents – illocutionary force-related phenomena

• Incompatibility with (immediately preceding) overt complementizers

• Formation of strong islands9

Embedded inverted interrogatives

Strong islands

15. ?[Which book]i did Dave ask whether he should read ti

16. *[Which book]i did Dave ask, “Should I read ti?”

17. *Which book did Dave ask should he read ti

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Embedded inverted interrogatives

Exceptions to the opacity of the EII?

18. Receptionist: Sir, we are very sorry! We cannot find your name on our lists! When did you say did you make the booking? (online source)

In line with German, Spanish long-distance successive cyclic extraction over non-question-selecting verbs – not possible over ask

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The theory: Speech Act Structure

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Acquisition of inversion

• Children are insensitive to inversion when answering questions; will extract out of “quotes” (Weverink 1991, Hollebrandse 2007)

• Children start out answering medial-wh over matrix-wh

• Correlation found between child use of EIIs (AAE) and more adult-like performance w.r.t medial-wh (De Villiers, De Villiers and Roeper 2011)

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Predictions for Acquisition

• Children with EIIs are more sensitive to subcategorisation and types of complements ==

• Children with EIIs recognise the embedded question as a separate questioning act

CORE PREDICTION:

• Children with EIIs will be sensitive to inversion in the embedded clause and will not give long-distance interpretations to matrix wh-words

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Pilot data

• Participants

– 5 children, all female (4;9, 7;1, 7;11, 8;0, 11;0)

– Acquiring standard American English (Amherst, MA)

• Tasks

– Question-answer task with storyboard

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Pilot data

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Pilot data

• Participants

– 5 children, all female (4;9, 7;1, 7;11, 8, 11)

– Acquiring standard American English (Amherst, MA)

• Tasks

– Question-answer task with storyboard

– Elicitation task (adapted from Pozzan 2011)

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Pilot data

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Pilot data• Question-Answer Task

– 16 questions; 5 fillers

– Questions vary according to 4 variables• In the embedded clause: Inversion, Question type, Tense

• In the matrix clause: Wh-word

– Each child receives two examples of each interaction Inversion x QuestionType x Tense; one with Where, one with How = within-subjects design

– Two lists (reversing Inversion in each item)

– Fillers test long-distance extraction

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Pilot data• Question-Answer Task

Scenario: Sam was very excited. He likes to visit the park on the weekends, but today was extra special – there would be lots of stands and people with things to sell there. He bounced out of bed and shouted really loud downstairs to Mom, “Mom! Can we go to the park on our new bikes today?” She said, “Yes of course! But quiet down now Sam, or you’ll wake your baby sister!”

Question: How did Sam ask if they could go to the park?

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Pilot data• Question-Answer Task

Scenario: Sam climbed up a tall, tall tower. The top was so high that he could see the whole park. He could see a little pen with lots of farm animals, including a pony and a horse. He asked Mother, “Which of those animals could I ride round the farm pen?” Mother said “Oh, I think a pony ride at the farm pen would be lovely! But we have to climb down from this tower first!”

Question: Where did Sam ask what could he ride?

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Pilot data

Question: How did Sam ask if they could go to the park?

• Potential answers:

– Short distance (SD) – By shouting down the stairs

– Long distance (LD) – On their bikes

– Embedded question (EQ) – Yes

– Quote (QI/QD) – Mom can we go to the park [on our bikes]?He asked if they could go to the park [on bikes]

– Other (OT)

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23

0

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

4;9 7;1 7;11 8 11 (Adult)

Nu

mb

er o

f re

spo

nse

s

Age of Participant

Types of answer (total)

SD LD EQ Quote Other

Pilot data• The extremes

11 : SD answers to all 16 questions

4;9 : LD answers to all 8 YN questions, EQ answers to all but one embedded WH question (which was LD) = no SD answers

• In the middle

7;1 : 11 SD answers, 3 LD answers (all YN), 2 EQ answers (all WH)

7;11 : 14 SD answers, 1 LD answer (How/NonInv/YN/Tense), 1 other

8 : 2 SD, 10 Quotation (3 Where), 4 LD

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Pilot data (excl. 11 yo)

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Where Inversion YN Tense HowNo

Inversion WH Modal

SD 15 17 16 20 21 19 20 16

LD 10 8 15 7 7 9 2 10

EQ 7 6 0 4 3 4 10 6

OT 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0

32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32

Pilot data

• Replication of Weverink 1991: only embedded YN questions, not WH questions, see LD responses; no distinction between inverted and non-inverted questions

• Replication of Weverink 1991, De Villiers et al 2011 and others: young children answer the medial-wh

• Semi-replication of Hollebrandse 2003/2007: children extract over inversion and ‘ask’ in both quote (Hollebrandse) and non-quotation contexts (this study)

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Pilot data• Some suggestion that older children without embedded inverted

interrogatives link inversion in the embedded clause to quotation; quotes-as-answers more common to inverted stimuli than non-inverted stimuli (continuation of Hollebrandse 2007)

• What changes in the child grammar? Tentative responses:– Children do not link just one syntactic structure to the semantic function of

interrogation to begin (cf. Weissenborn, Roeper and de Villiers 1991) –inversion and non-inversion are equally acceptable representations

– Children do not differentiate between the questioning acts early on; they do not treat the embedded wh-question as “less live” than the matrix one

– Satisfaction of the Q feature by selection is not a strong enough cue in Standard English that a question is embedded around age 5

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Pilot data

• Still to discover

– How do children with embedded inverted interrogatives in their dialect perform?

– Do they treat embedded inverted interrogatives as strong islands w.r.t extraction of arguments (is there an argument-adjunct asymmetry?)

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References• Berizzi, M. (2010). Interrogatives and relatives in some varieties of English. Doctoral dissertation, University of

Padua• De Villiers, J., P. de Villiers and T. Roeper (2011). Wh-questions: moving beyond the first phase. Lingua, 121,

352-366• Green, L. (2002). African American English: a linguistic introduction. Cambridge: CUP• Henry, A. (1995). Belfast English and Standard English: Dialect variation and parameter setting. Oxford: OUP• Hollebrandse, B. (2003). Long-distance WH-extraction revisited. Proceedings of BUCLD 27• Hollebrandse, B. (2007). A special case of wh-extraction in child language. Lingua, 117, 1897-1906• McCloskey• Pozzan, L. (2011). Asking questions in learner English: first and second language acquisition of main and

embedded interrogative structures. Doctoral dissertation, CUNY• Weissenborn, J., T. Roeper and J. de Villiers (1991). Embedded questions in French and German. In: T. Maxfield

and B. Plunkett, eds. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers Special Edition: Papers in the acquisition of WH (pp.43-75). Amherst, MA: GLSA

• Weverink, M. (1991). Inversion in the embedded clause. In: T. Maxfield and B. Plunkett, eds. University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers Special Edition: Papers in the acquisition of WH (pp.19-42). Amherst, MA: GLSA

• Woods, R. (2014). The syntax of embedded speech acts: a theoretical investigation with consequences for acquisition, Linguistics Association of Great Britain Annual Meeting, University of Oxford, 3rd September 2014

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