indirect questions (was : ni, jei....)

[And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>]

John:
[...]
> > BTW, use of subordinate interrogatives is cross-linguistically
> > pretty widespread.
>
> Indeed.  I did an enquiry on Linguist List once to find out about this,
> specifically with regard to Y/N indirect questions.
[...]
> > Is the English text of Saki available online? I'd be willing to
> > take a look.
>
> It is at http://www.iptweb.com/www/lib/openwin.html .  A hasty
> glance shows five indirect questions:

Thanks for these two reports, which settle a number of questions.

> > > knowledge of the value of the sumti, or desire to notexpress it at
> >                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> I grant that your first example can be *derived* from an underlying
> indirect question, but to actually *call* it an indirect question
> strikes me as over the top.

I was trying to adapt the terminology to make "indirect question"
a term denoting something in the semantics and "subordinate
interrogative" a term denoting something in the syntax.
"The value of the sumti" is syntactically a NP, not a
subordinate interrogative, but semantically it works like an
indirect question: semantically it is the same as "knowledge
of what the value of the sumti is".

--And