If I've understood correctly, so far there have been at least three
analyses for wh-clauses (I'm trying to use that as a neutral term) after
verbs like "wonder" (and apologies ahead of time if I've misconstrued
something):

(1)     It's a nominal clause. (Martha Kolln's position)

(2)     It's a headless relative, in this case acting as object of
elided  prep. (Bruce Despain's position) 

(3)     It's a kind of complement clause distinct from constituents that
can     be direct objects. (Karl Hagen's position)

For the sake of trivia-obsessed completeness, I'll add a fourth that I
ran across in some 19th-century sources:

(4)     The wh-pronoun at the beginning of these clauses acts both as a
relativizer and as its own head. (I'm viewing that as distinct from
        "headless," perhaps erroneously).


There are two pieces of "distribution data" that might be relevant here,
but I'm not sure how to factor them in:

(1) "What" can occur as the wh-form only if the clause is not acting
adjectivally, e.g. as a typical relative clause (at least, not in
standard English):

        I know what we're having for dinner.
        The food that/which we ate for dinner was quite good.
        *The food what we ate for dinner was quite good.

(2) Forms with "-ever" can only occur in the "nominalesque" forms,
although they can't occur in all such forms:

        *The food whichever we ate for dinner was quite good.
        You can have whatever you want.
        *I'm wondering whatever that is.

I view the distribution of "what" as sufficient grounds to consider
these clauses as not being relative clauses, at least in the traditional
sense, but that's more an issue of labeling than anything else (they
could simply be an odd subclass of relatives, if I wanted to extend the
definition of relatives). Distribution of -ever forms is obviously
affected by the meaning being expressed, but I'm not sure meaning alone
rules out their prohibition in "traditional" relative clauses. 

I'm not writing this to propose a solution -- I'm just interested in how
this fits into the different analyses. Kolln's distinction between
nominal wh-clauses and relative clauses deals with the distributions
nicely, but there remain all the other similarities between the two
types that push toward a view of them as being the same in some sense.

As a side note: I can say "I'm wondering something" as a conversation
opener with a friend (e.g. walk up with a quizzical expression and say
the sentence to get the hearer to say, "O.k., what are you wondering?").
I don't know if that's because I'm Southern or because I've screwed up
my neural circuits by thinking about language too much -- but
"something" is an NP.

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English
Central Michigan University


	

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