CHAPTER 22 INDIRECT ( or EMBEDDED ) QUESTIONS SUMMARY In this chapter, you will see that both yes-no and WH questions may be noun phrase complement sentences .Their behavior as embedded sentences is only slightly different.To begin with, we wiil review briefly the transformations essential to the generation of non-embedded interrogative sentences. The interrogative transformation shifts the auxiliary to the position before the subject noun phrase, the WH question transformation replaces the questions constituent with a noun phrase in wich the noun carries the feature ( + WH ).In interrogative sentences embedded as noun phrase complement, the interrogative transformation is not applied. In such sentences the auxiliary and the subject noun phrase are not inverted. The formulation of interrogative transformation and the question deletion transformation the former inverts the subject noun phrase and the auxiliary.The both of this transformations apply just to main sentences, never to embedded question sentences. For example when WH question are embedded as noun phrase complement : The WH question : - What can you see ? - Who can see ? Can be embedded as noun phrase complement become : - I don’t know what you see - I wonder who can see Generating WH questions embedded as noun phrase complement is no more complicated than generating such sentences when they are not embedded. The WH question transformation applies and replaces the questions constituent with the noun phrase (NP) containing a noun with the feature.
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