Indirect quotation
Indirect statements, questions, and commands are among the most common examples of complement clauses, and their grammatical features should be described in the same way as any other complement clause. Indirect questions often have special features, and in some languages, there are structural differences between an indirect Yes–No question (21b) vs. an indirect content question (21c). Consider the following English examples:
(22) a Direct Yes–No question:
John asked Mary, “Will you marry me?”
b Indirect Yes–No question:
John asked Mary [whether she would marry him].
(23) a Direct content question:
Mary asked John, “What are you eating?”
b Indirect content question:
Mary asked John [what he was eating].
English main clause questions, including questions indirect quotes, exhibit a special word-order pattern: the first auxiliary verb must precede the subject, as in (22a) and (23a).1 But, as the (b) examples illustrate, this “subject–Aux inversion” pattern is not found in indirect questions of either type. Both indirect Yes–No questions (22b) and indirect content questions (23b) exhibit the same basic word order found in statements, namely subject–Aux–verb–object.
Indirect content questions can be easily identified because they contain a question word, a feature they share with main clause content questions. Indirect Yes–No questions are identified in English by the use of a special complementizer, either whether or if.
1. As noted in Semantic roles and Grammatical Relations, sec. 4.3.1, this does not apply when the subject of the sentence is itself a Wh- word, as in (20c).
