Suppositional Wh-Questions About Perceptions, Conversations, and actions are More Productive than Paired Yes-No Questions when Questioning Maltreated Children

Forensic interviewers are taught to pair yes–no questions with open-ended requests for recall in order to reduce the likelihood that they will be misled by false “yes” responses. However, yes–no questions may elicit false “no” responses. Questioning 112 6- to 11-year-old maltreated children about three innocuous events (outside activities, yesterday, last birthday), this study compared the productivity of paired yes–no questions about perceptions, conversations, and actions involving the hands and mouth (e.g., “Did you say anything?”) with wh-questions (e.g., “What did you say?”). The wh-questions presupposed that children had content to provide, but did not specify that content. Children were twice as likely to deny content and half as likely to provide novel information when interviewers asked them yes–no questions. Younger children were more inclined than older children to deny content and give unelaborated “yes” responses. The results support further research into the potential for suppositional wh-questions to increase child witnesses’ productivity.

Reference to dependencies established in multiple-wh questions

In discourse, a universal statement establishes a dependency between sets of objects, which can support the evaluation of singular pronouns in a subsequent sentence. Two well-known phenomena involving such reference to a dependency are quantificational subordination and telescoping. This paper argues that a multiple-wh question admitting a pair-list answer can support subordination and telescoping, just like universal statements. Accordingly, the relevant phenomena are classified into two kinds of reference to dependencies, called ‘question subordination’ and ‘question telescoping’, which exhibit different properties. A dynamic family-of-questions analysis is developed to account for these phenomena. Briefly, a multiple- wh question generates a set of sub-questions, i.e., a family of questions, and then the set is transformed into a set of possible pair-list answers. Following Dynamic Plural Logic, the family of questions and possible pair-list answers encode different kinds of dependencies. Accessing the dependency encoded in a possible pair-list answer gives rise to question subordination, whereas accessing the dependency encoded in the family of questions gives rise to question telescoping.

Intervention Effects follow from Scope Rigidity in Turkish

Intervention effects in Turkish wh-questions can be obviated by the overt movement of the wh-phrase past the intervener. This cross-linguistically robust method of intervention obviation raises an important question: what is it that bans the covert movement of the wh-phrase? I argue that this question finds a natural answer in Scope Rigidity, a general restriction on the availability of inverse scope. Importantly, including wh-phrases in the domain of Scope Rigidity calls for a scopal account of wh-phrases. I argue that this general approach has welcome consequences in explaining the source of intervention effects and in predicting what can intervene, and can even accommodate how extraction islands containing wh-phrases behave in intervention configurations.

EFFECTIVENESS OF OBSERVE AND RELATE SELF - APPROACH (ORSA) IN ENHANCING THE GRAMMATICAL COMPETENCE: A

The study determined the effectiveness of Observation Response and Self-Approach (ORSA) in improving the grammatical competence of Grade 7 learners of Looc Integrated School. This study used the quasi- experimental design and pretest/ posttest questionnaire. ORSA was used as an approach to teach students grammar including WH questions, verb, and prepositions. This was limited to selected Grade 7 students with the lowest grammatical competence. The ORSA study was taken from the name of the author itself, a new way to assess students through positive assessments that explores the learner’s innate talents and skills and to reassure and to encourage the development of strength in students. It is also centered on the pedagogical approaches and emphasizes the use of positive assessment as to its unique feature in evaluating students’ performance utilizing non-threatening assessments that motivated the students to develop self-efficacy and eventually become an independent learner whose competencies acquired are internationally aligned and acceptable even during this new normal in the time of pandemic. The idea of ORSA can be anchored on Locke’s idea of reflection. Before applying the approaches, students got lower scores. After being exposed to the approaches, their mean scores increased. It can be implied that through the use of ORSA, the students think and question that they have learned through the persuasion of the teacher, they believed in themselves and in what they have learned. ORSA and K to 12, the two groups of student-participants have different levels of grammatical competence. As observed in the obtained means, students exposed to ORSA achieved higher grammatical competence as compared to students exposed to K to 12 teaching approach. This connotes that ORSA is proven effective in enhancing the grammatical competence of the students

Pragmatic Function Shifts in the Translation of WH Questions in “500 Days of Summer”

<p>The author is analyzing and conducting a translation research in interrogative utterances from the film "500 Days of Summer" especially WH questions, because WH questions not only contain information at the surface structure, but also pragmatic functions within them. This study is being carried out in order to help the writer and readers understand interrogative sentences more clearly. This research is conducted under Translational research using a descriptive qualitative method. The analysis applies the theory of Nida &amp; Taber’s translation theory, Newmark’s translation theory, Mona Baker’s translation techniques theory, Marcella Frank’s interrogative sentences theory and Nababan, Nuraeni &amp; Sumardiono’s translation quality assessment theory.</p>The scope of this research is a translational analysis of a film subtitle. This research focuses on the translation of interrogative utterances in the form of WH questions in the film "500 Days of Summer" specifically character dialogues. This research intends to investigate the pragmatic function of the utterances on the target language, as well as the pragmatic differences that may exist between the source and target languages, as well as the translator's translation techniques, including their impact on translation quality.

Agreeing and Moving across Traces: On Why Lower Copies May Be Transparent or Opaque

Within Minimalism, traces are often taken to be transparent for agreement and movement across them, which raises the question of how this could be properly accounted for within the copy theory of movement. This paper examines wh-traces in multiple wh-questions and argues that traces (lower copies) may or may not induce intervention effects depending on whether or not they are fully specified.

Stages rather than ages in the acquisition of movement structures: Data from sentence repetition and 27696 spontaneous clauses

This study explored the order of acquisition of various types of syntactic-movement and embedding structures in Hebrew, using a sentence-repetition task, in which 60 children aged 2;2-3;10 repeated 80 sentences (with a total of 4800 sentences), and an analysis of the spontaneous speech of 61 children aged 1;6-6;1 (27,696 clauses). The sentence repetition task revealed a set order of acquisition of the various types of syntactic movement: A-movement is acquired first, then A-bar-movement, and finally movement of the verb to C. The analysis of spontaneous speech revealed the same order: A-movement of the object of unaccusative verbs to subject position appears first, together with simple SV sentences; then, wh-questions appear, then relative clauses and topicalization, which appear together with embedding of finite clauses, and lastly, V-to-C movement. Previous studies have shown that Hebrew speakers under age six have difficulty comprehending and producing sentences with A-bar-movement in which a lexically-restricted object crosses over a lexically-restricted subject. And indeed, whereas children produced A-bar structures very early (wh-questions from age 1;6, relative-clauses and topicalization from age 2;6), until age 5;8 these structures never included a lexical DP crossing over another lexical DP. Both tasks indicated that the order of structure acquisition is fixed, creating Guttman scales between structures, but different children acquire the same structure at very different ages. It seems that whereas the syntactic path and the stages of structure acquisition along it are constant between children, each child walks this path in their own pace.

COMPARING ACCOUNTS OF ENGLISH WH-QUESTIONS ACQUISITION BY MONOLINGUALS AND BILINGUALS UNDER VARIOUS CONDITIONS

The comparison of English wh-questions acquisition by monolinguals, bilinguals and EFL learners showed inter-groups similarities, which included wh-questions formulaic use, overgeneralization, non-inverted structures, archiforms, double marking of auxiliaries and past tense. The authors suggest a special role of there is/are structures in the wh-questions acquisition by EFL learners. The research results allow assuming the impact of universal factors upon the process of wh-questions acquisition irrespective of the learners’ age, onset of the bilingualism, if they acquire English as the first or the second language, or whether it is acquired in the formal or informal environment.

Quoi-sluices in French

Sluicing has traditionally been analyzed as an operation involving wh-movement and deletion (Merchant 2001). French is a language that has both fronted and wh-in situ strategies; on the surface, however, it seems that French sluices do not involve (overt) movement, in spite of this being an available option. For nearly all wh-words, the in situ and moved forms are the same; the exception is que/quoi ‘what’— que is found in fronted wh-questions alone, while quoi is found in situ. In sluicing, only quoi surfaces, suggesting that French may be a challenge for the movement-and-deletion approach (Dagnac 2019). By formalizing an analysis within a late insertion approach to the syntax-morphology interface, I argue that not only do sluices in French involve full structure, but that they involve movement as well. I assume that the wh-word is initially represented in the syntactic derivation as an abstract feature bundle. The morphological form is determined in the mapping of syntax to morphology by locality-dependent Vocabulary Insertion (VI) rules that are sensitive to C. These rules apply only after ellipsis occurs. Following Thoms (2010), I argue that C is targeted in sluicing, and as a result destroys the context that would trigger que. This analysis is able to capture sluicing in French, while explaining the behavior of quoi more generally.