null WH questions

[Steven Schaufele]

Jan Anward wrote:

> Something like that is perfectly possible in Swedish, provided you
> start the sentence with "och" (and):
>
>         Och den ska till?
>         (and it is.going to)
>
> In this construction, the null need not be marked by a preposition:
>
>         Och du heter?
>         (and you are.called)

And Alan R. King writes:

> Colloquial Spanish (at least the variety I am conversant with) makes
> fairly liberal use of what David Gil proposes calling null WH
> questions.  For example:
>
> A: Estoy cabreado.
> B: Por...?
>
> A: "I am pissed off."
> B: "Because of/On account of...?"

I'm wondering to what extent constructions like these are different from
the things one can get in very colloquial English, such as:

	And you're going to ... ?
	And your name is ... ?
	Because ... ?

(Always, i believe, at least in my experience pronounced with
significant `stretching' of the last overt syllable in addition to
interrogative intonation)

I grant that English doesn't seem to allow for some of the options that
Jan mentions in connection with Swedish; i can't seem to imagine any
situation in which `And you'll have 0 today?' would sound acceptable to
me, but i have no trouble with `And today you'll have ... ?'  Alan's
suggestion that these are somehow related to echo questions seems worth
pursuing.

Best,
Steven
--
Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department

Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC

(886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504     fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw

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