Interrogative or Relative Clauses?.

"Rivista di Linguistica" 2 In the Indo-European languages, where there is the identity of morphological realisation between interrogative and independent relative pronouns, indirect WH questions and independent relatives are in many cases homophonous. Although the two constructions, interrogative and independent relative, are acknowledged in literature as syntactically and semantically different, the evaluation of these subordinates lacks consistency when they depend on a series of semifactive assertive families of predicates. This discordance in the interpretation of the same clause, oscillating between interrogative and independent relative, constitutes, in itself, grounds for analysis. It has consequences not only on the level of descriptive adequacy, but it also seems to have some bearing on the explanatory principles of linguistic theory. In giving an adequate description of independent relatoves and indirect WH questions, an appropriate semantic characterisation, verified in a variety of different pragmatic contexts is necessary. A contrastive framework, moreover, evidentiates the relevance of semantics and pragmatics not only in controlling linguistic stipulations, but in capturing wider generalisations and in abstracting properties of language. The question is all the more interesting because syntactic theory, in its mostly influential variants, has been constructed via argumentation which makes minimum use of necessarily pre-theoretic notions about meaning and connected thought.