double bind

[Laurence Horn]

On May 22, 2012, at 1:12 PM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:

> On May 22, 2012, at 10:00 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>>>>> Does anyone see what's the tactic is?
>>
>> A) "Does anyone know what's the tactic?" X B) "Does anyone know what
>> the tactic is?"
>
> as i said in my posting, i'm dubious about the blend analysis, given other occurrences of emphatic "what's".
>
>> But, fifty years ago, didn't Labov write that strings like A were a
>> peculiarity of BE? If that was so, then the structure has taken United
>> States English in general by storm, from that humble beginning.
>
> A has Subject-Verb Inversion in a subordinate clause, which is what Labov identified as a characteristic of BEV.  whatever the history, A and its uncontracted variant
>  A' ... what is the tactic
> are now quite common -- and as far as i can tell, no longer with any particular association to BEV:

I remember George Lakoff somewhere describing his (non-AAVE) dialect in which an embedded wh-clause inverts just in case the speech act in question involves a speaker-oriented indirect question, so

I {asked/*told} him when will dinner be ready.
{I/*They} wonder what did she say.
I {want to know/*already) know how are you going to get here on time.

etc.  Can't remember where this is written up, but maybe one of those CLS volumes from the early 1970s.

LH

> i googled up:
>
> a fair number of
>  I don’t see what’s the issue (A)
> but a *huge* number of
>  I don’t see what is the issue (A')
> and a lot of
>  I don’t see what the issue is (B)
>
> arnold
>
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