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Reduced Questions and Their Theoretical Implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Randall Hendrick
Randall Hendrick*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Abstract

English questions lacking an auxiliary (e.g. You happy now?) fail to occur in certain tenses. The first part of this paper suggests that the phenomenon derives from the interaction of the Recoverability Condition (Chomsky 1965) with markedness conventions for tense structures. The second part shows that reduced yes–no questions differ from reduced WH-questions as regards their sensitivity to person, number, morphological redundancy, and contraction. It is argued that reduced yes–no questions and reduced WH-questions do not constitute a unified phenomenon, and that the asymmetries in the two classes reflect properties of distinct components in the grammar.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , December 1982 , pp. 800 - 819
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by Linguistic Society of America

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