Wh-interrogative versus Nominal Relative Clauses

[Mari Carmen]

Hi everyone, 

 

I have some problems to differentiate some Wh-interrogative and Nominal Relative Clauses. 

 

Could you help me with these examples? thanks 

 

 

1. Do you remember when Columbus discovered America?

Do you remember when we first came here, darling?

What caused the fire remains a mystery.

We never discovered what caused the fire

[fuzzylogician]

This sounds like a homework assignment, and even as such it's not at all clear what you are asking. 

[Guest Gnome Chomsky]

I may be wrong but I think numbers 1 and 3 are interrogative. A link I saw said interrogative Wh- is when a question is directly asked or when it is implied. For example, "They inquired what our business was," is interrogative because it implies uncertainty and can be turned into a question ("What is your business?"), but, "They guessed what our business was," just describes an event (the event of you guessing their business).  

 

Looking at your four examples (I may be completely wrong but I googled your question and read some links describing the two), I believe 1 and 3 are interrogative. 

 

In #1 the question revolves around "when." The person is asking when Christopher Columbus discovered America. It could simply be rewritten as, "When did Christopher Columbus discover America?" Whereas in #2  the question revolves around if the person remembers a particular event. This could be rewritten without the word "when" and still have the same meaning; i.e. "Do you remember our first time here, my darling?" You see that the word when serves no purpose. 

 

Moving on to #3 and 4. Like in my example in the first paragraph, #3 shows uncertainty and implies a question. It can be rewritten as, "What caused the fire?" The sentence says the question remains a mystery. Whereas in #4 it describes that they never discovered what caused the fire. It isn't implying a question as much as it's saying the case went unsolved. These two are similar to my examples, "They inquired what our business was," and, "They guessed what our business was." #3 states that the mystery about the fire is still in question, while #4 affirms that the cause of the fire went undiscovered. 

 

Hope I was some help. Someone please correct me if I was wrong. Or please better explain my explanations. 

[Guest Gnome Chomsky]

And if it is a homework assignment, as fuzz said, you need to learn how to do independent research. I googled this and came to a conclusion in less than 5 minutes. I didn't get the exact answer to your questions but I got similar answers and I just put 2 and 2 together. I see Ms. Mari just created this name 30 minutes ago and immediately posted this question. Either you've been lurking these boards for years and were just too shy to say hi, or you registered for the first linguistics forum you found on the internet. Either way, you got your answer (maybe). Don't be a stranger... now that you're a member. 

[fuzzylogician]

OK, I'll bite. I think there is confusion here about the definitions. 

 

The meaning of a question is the set of all possible (true) answers to the question. There are different theories of questions out there, but one useful way to think of a question is as a set of propositions that could be true of the world, where the task of the listener is to identify the (maximal) proposition in the set that is in fact true in the world. Syntactically, questions are CPs (or whatever is your favorite notation for full clauses, including tense, aspect, etc). For the English question in (1a), we have its denotation in (1b).

 

(1) a. Who came? (assuming the relevant individuals in the domain are John, Fred and Bill)

     b. {John came, Bill came, Fred came, John and Bill came, Bill and Fred came, ..., John and Bill and Fred came} 

 

Questions can be embedded under certain types of predicates. There are predicates that can embed both declarative and interrogative clauses, e.g. remember, discover. This is important because it means that seeing an embedding headed by a wh-word (as in 1,2,4 in the OP) doesn't tell us whether or not we are in fact dealing with an embedded question.

 

And that brings me to relative clauses. Relative clauses are essentially modified nouns. They are DPs (or NPs, if you prefer), so they are a smaller syntactic structure than questions. Here we are dealing with 'free relatives' or 'headless relatives', which you can imagine are modifying a silent head noun. I'll use a different example than in the OP because I think it helps the discussion. (2a) is a non-restrictive relative, (2b) is a restrictive relative, and (2c) is a headless relative. In all cases, there is a natural position that we can imagine the relative pronoun (which, that, what) originated from or is otherwise somehow related to (=the object position, following the noun). People write whole books about how that relation is established, so lets ignore the details for now.  

 

(2) a. The food [which you ate ___ ]

     b. The food [that you ate ___ ]

     c. [ ] [what you ate ___ ]

 

Now, the whole structure is basically a noun that is modified by a clause. At the end of the day, we are dealing with a DP. Semantically, it's an individual or a set of individuals, so it's a different creature than a question (which, recall, is a set of propositions). DPs can occupy positions that CPs can't (and vice versa). E.g., DPs can appear on either side of a copular sentence: [note interesting English peculiarities, e.g. you can't say 'who came is John', but you can do that in other languages.]

 

(3) X is Y. 

     a. What we ate for dinner is a banana.

     b. A banana is what we ate for dinner.

 

Finally -- for the punchline of the OP's exercise: Something like 'what you ate' can act either as a question or as a headless relative, so you need to ask yourself about the environment it appears in in order to know what kind of creature it is in each of your sentences. I think it's easier to find positive evidence for whether or not you are dealing with a headless relative, and decide you are dealing with a question if the diagnostics are not satisfied.

- If unembedded, is the whole utterance a question or a statement? If it's a statement, then we are dealing with a headless relative, not a question. 

- If embedded, what does it denote? Does it refer to an individual (a particular thing in the world, or a collection of things), as you would expect from a headless relative? In particular, if you are dealing with a headless relative, it's just a DP and can be replaced by another one, with an overt head, with minimal changes to the content of the sentence. Use generic heads ('thing' for relatives headed by 'what', 'time' for relatives headed by 'when', 'place' for relatives headed by 'where', etc. So, 'what you ate' --> 'the thing (that) you ate'). Is the meaning of the sentence (more or less) retained? If you are dealing with a question, then the replacement will cause a more serious change to the meaning of the whole utterance, possibly making it ill-formed. 

 

I believe that doing this will result in quite different answers than provided in the post above mine. But -- you should do it yourself, I'm not going to just provide you with the solution.