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Interrogative Slifting: More syntactic, less parenthetical

Paper · 2016 · Arthur Stepanov and Penka Stateva

Summary

The paper revisits how to analyze interrogative Slifting, questions like Who is a Martian, do you think?, where two inverted interrogative clauses together act as one question meaning roughly "Who do you think is a Martian?". Haddican et al. (2014), abbreviated HHTT, had argued that the two clauses never c-command each other and are linked only indirectly, through evidentiality, mood and pragmatic principles. That treatment keeps the main clause essentially parenthetical. Stepanov and Stateva accept HHTT's evidence that the slift does not move out of an embedded position. They deny, however, that this rules out a link to wh-scope marking (German Was glaubst du, wen…, Hindi kyaa…ki). They recast the construction within the Indirect Dependency framework, originally built for scope marking. In their version the main clause is an adjunct and the slift relates to it through coindexation, or through late merger in a second variant. This places the phenomenon among ordinary UG structural options and needs no parenthesis-specific machinery. It also hints at a way to unify interrogative and declarative Slifting, using a silent correlative pronoun.

Key points

  • The work is purely theoretical syntax and semantics, argued from constructed English examples with cross-linguistic comparison to German, Hindi and Basque. It uses no corpus, treebank or quantitative evaluation.
  • HHTT's three arguments against clausal movement are endorsed:
    • Both clauses show Subject-Aux Inversion.
    • Backward binding into the slift is unavailable.
    • Condition C effects are absent (What did John buy, did he say?).
  • HHTT cited three differences from wh-scope marking, all revisited by the authors under their own analysis:
    • The slift has root status.
    • The construction cannot be embedded under wonder or ask.
    • The main-clause subject tends to be second person.
  • Two versions of Indirect Dependency are compared. The coindexation-based version 1 is judged preferable for both interrogative and declarative Slifting.
  • For declarative Slifting, the authors sketch a structure with a silent correlative IT, where the main clause (I think IT) is an adjunct. This lets the main clause appear in flexible positions, since there is no asymmetric c-command. The work was funded by ARRS program P6-0382.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Two surface clauses can be read as a single semantic question whose content equals a long-distance wh-question, so form and illocution need not match one-to-one.
  • I2. Root diagnostics (inversion in both clauses, no backward binding, no Condition C) are used as tests for whether one clause was ever embedded in another.
  • I3. Island-violating variants (…do you wonder whether she said?) provide reliable ungrammatical contrasts for the construction.
  • I4. A shared structural skeleton (an adjoined main clause linked by coindexation to a contentful clause) covers both declarative and interrogative variants instead of building separate machinery for each.
  • I5. Slifted and long-distance forms are near-synonymous alternants of the same meaning.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Emit one question speech act for "X?, do you think?" and attach the main clause as the addressee's belief context, rather than producing two separate questions.
  • I2 (tree): These diagnostics could decide whether a comma-separated "do you think / she said" should be parsed as parataxis rather than as ccomp after reordering, keeping the attachment choice explainable.
  • I3 (learn): Such minimal pairs make good negative controls when checking whether silver parses or repair rules wrongly accept impossible slifted questions.
  • I4 (world): Store "Max is a Martian, I think" and "I think Max is a Martian" as the same proposition under a speaker-belief holding, so the world model does not split them.
  • I5 (back): The generator could choose between "Who do you think is a Martian?" and the slifted form from one graph, as a style or register option, and use the pair as a round-trip compressor test.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: University of Nova Gorica.

📚 Shelves 4 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Psychology · 798 works Developmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

Cite

Cite as Arthur Stepanov and Penka Stateva. 2016. Interrogative Slifting: More syntactic, less parenthetical. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.117

@article{stepanov2016interrogative,
  title = {{Interrogative Slifting: More syntactic, less parenthetical}},
  author = {Arthur Stepanov and Penka Stateva},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.117},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.117}
}

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  58. How to cite this article: Stepanov, Arthur and Penka Stateva. 2016. Interrogative Slifting: More syntactic, less parenthetical. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 1(1): 30. 1–33, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.117 ↗ our card
  59. Published: 30 August 2016 find
  60. Copyright: © 2016 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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