Re: Conjunctive Inversion

On Tue, 28 Feb 2006 12:40:34 GMT, Ron Hardin <rhhardin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Ekkehard Dengler wrote:

Ron Hardin schrieb:
Padraic Brown wrote:
*Does your family feel overwhelmed and you don't know where to turn?

What's wrong with this one?

The second half isn't a question.

For one thing, it's assertive and questions are nonassertive.

An assertion wouldn't be followed by a question mark. Quirk and Greenbaum
("University Grammar of English") classify sentences like "You've got the
explosive?" or "You realize what the risks are?" as "declarative questions".
Similarly, "You don't know where to turn?" could be considered a question,
too, couldn't it?

Regards,
Ekkehard

It's a little complicated by being a negative. Make it positive :

Do you know anything about English?

*You know anything about English?

The latter is assertive, and so won't accept ``anything.''

Well, it's plain you don't know much of anything about English. In the
last month or so, I've counted now about _seven_ glaring examples of
how you, Ron, fail to grasp basic facts about how the English language
works and what is allowed in it.

This is a perfect example. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the
question above -- the one you say shouldn't be allowed to accept
"anything" in it.

But yes, there are declarative questions (or interrogative declarations, more likely).
That's not the construction in this case, however. It's just the best they could do
in the matter of inversion of a conjunction.

Doesn't matter what the root cause was. The result was a question.

The interesting thing would be to find the rule, and speculate why this occasionally
needed operation is not provided for.

If you think it all sounds fine, you're not one who can join in in the wondering.

We simply join in a different sort of wondering. We wonder what your
native language is - and why you won't tell us. We wonder how it is
you have such a skewed understanding of English. We wonder how it is
you never quite seem to get it.

Padraic.

la cieurgeourea provoer mal trasfu
ast meiyoer ke 'l andrext ben trasfu.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Parr the Hypocrite
    ... > Philth has announced the discovery of a new pronoun in English: ... > Philth Innes: ... > Orwell, this time a letter asserting that _We_ was banned in the United ... > Your equally false assertion that _We_ was not published in English ...
    (rec.games.chess.misc)
  • Re: Book sales, Schiller, and USCF
    ... > Innes is alluding to his exciting discoveries in languages. ... > Philth has announced the discovery of a new pronoun in English: ... as if it were a language. ... > Your equally false assertion that _We_ was not published in English ...
    (rec.games.chess.misc)
  • Re: Parr the Hypocrite
    ... Philth has announced the discovery of a new pronoun in English: ... Philth Innes: ... Your equally false assertion that _We_ was not published in English ... asserted that the novel had been suppressed by the American and British ...
    (rec.games.chess.misc)
  • Re: Long vs. short vowels in English
    ... >> How often is this the assertion of the crackpot! ... > French people spend a decade or more studying English under the guidance ... > of highly credentialed teachers with training in linguistics. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Dereks Possible Licence Violations? was Re: Disadvantages of Delphi.NET
    ... entertaining watching you type you way right into a corner. ... "It seems reasonable to assume that he did not have a non-demo version of D8 ... one struggling with English, although it isn't my primary language. ... > assertion by the very subject line you yourself quoted above. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)