Analyzing WH-questions the H&P CGEL way

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Anonymous

#511412 Thu, 08 May 08 11:18 PM

Hi!

I am reading Huddleston & Pullum's CGEL, and I've run into a problem. I don't understand how to analyze WH-questions with both subject-auxiliary inversion and . Couldn't somebody help me out?

Let us take the sentence What did the Captain say? as an example. Here the Captain is obviously the subject. But what is the predicate? Is it say ___, with the gap as the object, or what is it?

This is the solution I've come to, but I'm at all sure it is not altogether wrong:

[Clause[Prenucleus:NP_i [Head:N What]] [Nucleus:Clause [Prenucleus:V_j did] [Nucleus:Clause [Subject:NP [Det:D the] [Head:N Captain]] [Predicate:VP [Predicator:GAP_j ___] [CatComp:Clause [Predicate:VP [Predicator:V say] [Object:GAP_i ___]]]]]]]

Tree diagram http://rapidshare.com/files/113547469/stgraph.png.html

Looks totally weird to me. Any ideas?

//AC

Anonymous

Clauses, Auxiliaries, Predicates, Images

Anonymous

#511488 Fri, 09 May 08 05:22 AM

Oh, I'm so sorry.

First, I posted in the wrong forum. This topic would be more appropriate in ESL Linguistics Discussion Forum. Could the moderators move it there, if possible?

Second, "WH-questions with both subject-auxiliary inversion and ." was meant to read "WH-questions with both interrogative phrase fronting and subject-auxiliary inversion." Likewise, "I'm at all sure" is "I'm not at all sure."

Third, the third paragraph should rather read like this (because the italics don't show up for some reason):

Let us take the sentence "What did the Captain say?" as an example. Here "the Captain" is obviously the subject. But what is the predicate? Is it "say ___", with the gap as the object, or what is it?

And lastly, of the image only the text label was left. Man, did I mess up the post!

//AC

Anonymous

Auxiliaries, Predicates, Paragraphs

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