Re: whether

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

>> I have never heard "whether" used like
>> this, though I suppose it might be common in the U.S.  Us Brits would just
>> say "She knew he was hungry."
>
>This is why I only work on English: I can judge when other
>people's reports are accurate. If someone made claims like yours
>about a language I don't know well, I'd be at their mercy, and
>would end up drawing conclusions from false premises.
>
>Anyway, what can I say? Your report is false to an extent
>so blatant that I can scarcely believe you mean it, and am
>hard pressed to think of a way to end your delusion.
>

.u'u .u'u
This is what happens when you (a) introduce what you really wanted to talk
about with a flippant comment and (b) rely too much on "native speaker
intuition".  What often happens is that you have a particular
extra-linguistic context in mind, search your "intuition bank" for
appropriate sentences, and forget the other contexts.

>p.s. It occurs to me that you might speak a nonstandard dialect
>where "whether" is much less common than "if". Do you find
>"She knew if he was hungry" any better? Where did you grow up?
>
Depends on context again.  I would guess that in most contexts, in most
dialects, "if" is more common than "whether", and "when" is more common
than either of them, but then I'm not a dialectician.  Incidentally, I'm
from Darkest Shropshire, but my normal speech community is pretty
international.  Maybe I've been corrupted by Turkish English ;-)

>As for "whether" Qs in British
>English, you could consult, say, Quirk et al's Comprehensive
>Grammar of the English Language.
>
I wasn't talking about questions but declaratives, and I'm not sure the
same rules apply.

>BTW, if you are British, where did you acquire your cognitivist
>proclivities?
>
.ue ki'a




Robin Turner

Bilkent Universitesi,
IDMYO,
Ankara,
Turkey.

<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309>