preposition stranding and null WH questions

[Tom Payne]

And I am interested in this because . . .?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Discussion List for The Association for Linguistic Typology
> [mailto:LINGTYP at LINGUIST.LDC.UPENN.EDU]On Behalf Of David Gil
> Sent: Sunday, October 25, 1998 11:55 AM
> To: LINGTYP at LINGUIST.LDC.UPENN.EDU
> Subject: preposition stranding and null WH questions
>
>
> Without wishing to hijack Maria Polinsky's query (and without having
> anything to add to it), there's a possibly related phenomenon which I've
> been interested in for some time now -- and I wonder if anybody has
> anything to say about.
>
> I call the construction "null WH question", because it has the following
> two properties:
>
> (a) It has the meaning of a WH question in English
> (b) There is no WH word present; instead, there's a preposition without
> its object -- and it's precusely that object which is being asked about.
>
> In Malay / Indonesian this construction occurs in the Kuala Lumpur and
> Irian Jaya dialects, but not in the Riau dialect.  Examples (form my
> corpus of spontaneous speech specimens):
>
> (1) Ini dari?
>     this from
>     "Who is this from?"
>     [Kuala Lumpur, secretary on phone, asking caller to identify
> themselves]
>
> (2) Kau mau ke?
>     you want to
>     "Where are you going?"
>     [Irian Jaya, semi-conventionalized greeting]
>
> Intuitively, it's the *impermissibility* of preposition stranding which,
> paradoxically, seems to license these constructions and endow them with
> their meaning:  if you can't end a sentence with a preposition,
> something must be missing, and one way of dealing with this is to assume
> the speaker wants you to fill in the missing object -- which accounts
> for the WH question interpretation.
>
> But this can't be the whole story, because why then is the construction
> okay in some dialects but not in others?
>
> A further complication:  in Hebrew, in which there are generally no
> dangling prepositions, the null WH question construction is possible for
> exactly one preposition:
>
> (3) biSvil?
>     for
>     "What for?"
>
> With all other prepositions it is impossible.
>
> If anybody has any ideas, suggestions, further data from other
> languages, or references concerning this construction, I'd be very
> interested.
>
> David
>
>
>
> --
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistics
> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
> Inselstrasse 22
> D-04103 Leipzig
> Germany
>
> tel:  49-341-9952310
> fax:  49-341-9952119
> email:  gil at eva.mpg.de
>