Born | July 3, 1945 |
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Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
Known for | Generative grammar, Principles and Parameters of language development, structure building model of child language acquisition |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Generative grammar, syntax, child language acquisition |
Institutions | University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of East Anglia, University College of North Wales, University of Essex |
Doctoral advisor | Pieter Seuren: a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen |
Influences | Noam Chomsky |
Telemachus: 'We're waiting for Odysseus to come home.'
Antinuous: 'You're waiting for who to do what?'
From 'The Comeback' by Albert Ramsdell Gurney
Mary: 'What do you want?'
George Bailey: 'What do I want? Why, I'm just here to get warm, that's all!'
From 'It's a Wonderful Life'
Holden: 'I used to play checkers with her all the time.'
Stradlater: 'You used to play what with her all the time?'
Holden: 'Checkers.'
From 'The Catcher in the Rye' by J.D. Salinger, 1951
'We use echo questions either because we did not fully hear or understand what was said, or because its content is too surprising to be believed.
A: It cost $5,000.
B: How much did it cost?
A: His son's an osteopath.
B: His son's a what?
Echo questions are usually spoken with a rising intonation and with a strong emphasis on the wh-word (what, who, how, and so on).'
From 'A Glossary of Grammar Terms' by Geoffrey Leech, Edinburgh University Press, 2006
'Consider the following dialogue:
A: He had said someone would do something.
B: He had said who would do what?
Speaker B largely echoes what Speaker A says, except for replacing someone by who and something by what. For obvious reasons, the type of question produced by speaker B is called an echo question. However, speaker B could alternatively have replied with a non-echo question like, 'Who had he said would do what?'
'If we compare the echo question, He had said who would do what? with the corresponding non-echo question Who had, he said would do what? we find that the latter involves two movement operations which are not found previously. One is an auxiliary inversion operation by which the past-tenseauxiliaryhad is moved in front of its subjecthe. The other is a wh-movement operation by which the wh-word who is moved to the front of the overall sentence, and positioned in front of had.'
From 'English Syntax: An Introduction' by Geoffrey Leech, Cambridge University Press, 2004
'A speaker may question a question by repeating it with a rising intonation. Note that we use normal question structures with inverted word order, not indirect question structures, in this case.
' 'Where are you going?' 'Where am I going? Home.'
'What does he want?' 'What does he want? Money as usual.'
'Are you tired?' 'Am I tired? Of course not.'
'Do squirrels eat insects?' 'Do squirrels eat insects? I'm not sure.' '
From 'Practical English Usage' by Michael Swan, Oxford University Press, 1995