Re: LUNATIC SURVEY: 2005

(I think Andreas intended this to go to the full list.  I suspect
this is not his fault, since as I said my university is transitioning
to a new email system right now, and there are obviously lots of
kinks still to be ironed out.)

>Quoting Thomas Wier <trwier@...>:
>> Briefly, there seems to
>> be an assymetry between the kind of long-distance dependency in
>> multiple wh-word constructions between, such that in English you
>> can't say *"Whom did who see?", but in German you can say "Wen liebt
>> wer?"
>
>It's funny. I've never been consciously aware of that English rule before, and
>when stated like this it strikes me as entirely bizarre. Yet, I realize I
>actually do obey it when speaking or writing English. The twist is that the
>thought to put a such rule into a conlang would, before Thomas pointed it out,
>never have occured to me, despite me being a fluent speaker of a language that
>has it.
Yeah.  There are all sorts of extremely subtle properties of
language that totally get missed in standard grammars. Understandably
so, since how often does the possibility even arise that one needs to
use multiple wh-constructions, or potentially violate island constraints,
in real life?
 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

Replies