An echo question is a question that seeks to confirm or clarify another speaker's utterance (the ''stimulus''), by repeating it back in some form. For example: A: I'm moving to Greenland. B: You're moving ''where''?? In English, echo questions have a distinctive prosody, featuring a rising intonation. A speaker may use an echo question to seek confirmation because they find the stimulus surprising, or simply because they did not hear it clearly. Echo questions have unusual syntactic properties (including a lack of

wh-movement In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position ...

), which have made them a challenge to account for in linguistic theories of

question A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammar, grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are inte ...

Function

Echo questions are primarily used to seek a confirmation or repetition of some portion of the stimulus, either because the listener finds what they thought they heard surprising or was unable to hear the speaker clearly. The ''

Cambridge Grammar of the English Language ''The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language'' (''CGEL'') is a descriptive grammar of the English language. Its primary authors are Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Huddleston was the only author to work on every chapter. It was publi ...

'' identifies another use, where the listener seeks a reformulation of some part of the stimulus, as in: A: I'm taking him to the dance. B: You're taking who to the dance? These also permit

polar Polar may refer to: Geography Polar may refer to: * Geographical pole, either of two fixed points on the surface of a rotating body or planet, at 90 degrees from the equator, based on the axis around which a body rotates * Polar climate, the c ...

forms such as: B: You're taking James to the dance? The CGEL terms these ''clarification echoes'' and notes that they differ in intonation from prototypical (or ''repetition'') echo questions, but are syntactically of a kind.

Classification

As with questions more broadly, echo questions may be classified according to the set of answers they permit as either polar (yes/no), variable, or

alternative Alternative or alternate may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * Alternative (''Kamen Rider''), a character in the Japanese TV series ''Kamen Rider Ryuki'' * ''The Alternative'' (film), a 1978 Australian television film * ''The Alternative ...

(though these are rare). The following examples are all in response to the stimulus "He saw a crocodile." ; Polar : He saw a crocodile? ; Variable : He saw a what? ; Alternative : He saw a crocodile or an alligator? A polar echo question (also known as a ''pure echo'') repeats some or all of the stimulus, with a rising intonation. It bears some similarity to the

rising declarative In linguistics, a rising declarative is an utterance which has the syntactic form of a declarative but the rising intonation typically associated with polar interrogatives. # ''Rising declarative:'' Justin Bieber wants to hang out ...

. A variable echo question involves substituting one (or more) elements of the stimulus with a

wh word An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as ''what, which'', ''when'', ''where'', '' who, whom, whose'', ''why'', ''whether'' and ''how''. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most o ...

. Unlike a normal variable question, echoes do not exhibit

wh-fronting In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position ...

subject–auxiliary inversion Subject–auxiliary inversion (SAI; also called subject–operator inversion) is a frequently occurring type of inversion in English, whereby a finite auxiliary verb – taken here to include finite forms of the copula ''be'' – appears to "inve ...

Bare predication

A special case of polar echo questions is the ''bare predication'' construction (also called the ''incredulity response''). It combines a subject with either a non-finite verb phrase: A: Alice worried about the price of the tickets. B: Alice, worry? ...or a predicative complement: A: She's totally bankrupt. B: Her, bankrupt? When the subject is a pronoun, it appears in

accusative case The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...

Pseudo echo questions

A response may echo the content of a stimulus and have similar intonation to an echo question, but follow the syntactic rules of a normal question (including wh-fronting and subject-auxiliary inversion), as in: A: He saw a crocodile. B: ''What'' did he see? Some authors include these among echo questions while others do not. Nicholas Sobin terms these "pseudo echo questions".

Range of wh-substitution

''What'' and other ''wh-'' words have a much more flexible distribution in echo questions than in ordinary ''wh-'' questions. For example, they may stand in for sub-word units: A: I matriculated at Stanford. B: You ''what''-ulated? Rarely, an echo question may include multiple variables: A: I got a Tamagotchi from eBay. B: You got a what from where? However, certain words like

preposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

s and quantifiers may be focused in polar echo questions, but do not have a corresponding variable echo question: A: She had on a bra over her t-shirt. B: She had on a bra ''over'' her t-shirt? B: * She had on a bra her t-shirt?

Modification of stimulus

An echo question need not exactly repeat the stimulus. First or second person pronouns will be inverted to reflect the change of speaker: A: I ate your plums. B: You ate my plums? Echo questions may also reduce the original stimulus by omitting portions, or replacing them with

pro-forms In linguistics, a pro-form is a type of function word or expression that stands in for (expresses the same content as) another word, phrase, clause or sentence where the meaning is recoverable from the context. They are used either to avoid rep ...

. For example, all of the following are possible echo question responses to the stimulus "He's taking their dalmatian puppy to the vet once his mom gets back with the car." (the focused constituent is marked in italics): Their ''what'' puppy? He's taking their puppy ''where''? Once ''who'' gets back? He's taking it to ''the vet''?

Rodney Huddleston Rodney D. Huddleston (born 4 April 1937) is a British linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English. Huddleston is the primary author of ''The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language'' (), which presents a comp ...

accounts for such modifications by theorizing that the relevant repetition is of the

illocutionary act The concept of illocutionary acts was introduced into linguistics by the philosopher J. L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. In his framework, ''locution'' is what was said and meant, ''illocution'' is what was done, ...

associated with the stimulus, rather than its surface form.

Intonation

Some languages, including English and German, feature a distinctive 'echo intonation'. Japanese does not have a dedicated intonational pattern for echo questions, but they may optionally be marked lexically with the sentence-final particle '' -tte''.

Relation with clause type

The stimulus may be of any clause type (declarative, interrogative, imperative, or exclamative), and may not even be a complete clause: A: Hi darling. B: Hi who? The ''Cambridge Grammar of the English Language'' does not classify echo questions as a distinct clause type. Rather, it treats them as having the same syntactic form as the stimuli they echo. For example, an echo of an imperative clause is also an imperative clause, as in: A: Bring me the axe. B: Bring you the what? Eun-Ju Noh disputes this treatment of echo questions as indirect speech acts, and argues that, syntactically, all echo questions should be understood as interrogatives.

Echoes of questions

The stimulus may itself be a question, giving rise to a "second-order" echo question: A: Where's your cravat? - variableB: Where's my what? - polar B: Where's my cravat? It would not be appropriate for A to respond to 2 with something like "in your top drawer", since the echo question is effectively equivalent to "Did you ask me where my cravat is?" or "Did you say 'Where's my cravat?'?". Rather, a typical answer would be something like "Yes, where is it?", or "No, I said 'Where's your civet?'".

References

{{reflist, refs= Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey K. Pullum. (2002) ''

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language ''The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language'' (''CGEL'') is a descriptive grammar of the English language. Its primary authors are Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Huddleston was the only author to work on every chapter. It was publ ...

.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. {{ISBN, 0-521-43146-8. McCawley, James D. ''The syntactic phenomena of English''. University of Chicago Press, 1998. Parker, F., & Pickeral, J. (1985). Echo Questions in English. ''

American Speech ''American Speech'' is a quarterly academic journal of the American Dialect Society, established in 1925 and currently published by Duke University Press. It focuses primarily on the English language used in the Western Hemisphere, but also publis ...

'', 60(4), 337-347. {{doi, 10.2307/454911 {{cite journal, last=Huddleston, first=Rodney, title=The Contrast between Interrogatives and Questions, journal=Journal of Linguistics, volume=30, issue=2, year=1994, pages=411–439, url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4176277, url-access=subscription {{cite journal, last=Noh, first=Eun-Ju, title=Echo Questions: Metarepresentation and Pragmatic Enrichment, journal=Linguistics and Philosophy, volume=21, issue=6, year=1998, pages=603–628, url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25001724 , url-access=subscription Artstein, Ron
"A focus semantics for echo questions."
Workshop on information structure in context. Vol. 98. IMS, University of Stuttgart, 2002. Sobin, Nicholas
"On the syntax of English echo questions."
Lingua 81.2-3 (1990): 141-167. UEKI, M. (1989). Echo questions in German and Japanese. Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 9(3). {{doi, 10.1515/text.1.1989.9.3.307 Grammar Types of question