Embedded Inverted Questions as Embedded Illocutionary Acts Rebecca Woods 1. Introduction Embedded inverted questions (EIQs) are a fairly well studied phenomenon in English dialects and have previously been analysed as evidence for direct CP recursion in Germanic languages. In this paper, their properties as speech reports will be further investigated and the CP recursion analysis will be updated, showing that the structure of EIQs has implications for our understanding of clausal selection and the possibility of embedded speech acts in natural language. Specifically, further evidence will be provided that not all cases of clausal complementation involve selection and evidence of embedded illocutionary force in English will be presented. The paper is structured as follows; the key data on EIQs will be presented along with new observations on their meaning and use. Secondly, an analysis of the embedded clause itself will be presented which proposes that illocutionary force independent of the matrix force is available in EIQs. Thirdly, a proposal for the linking of the EIQ and the matrix clause will be made which accounts for both the embedded characteristics of the EIQ and its incompatibility with selection by the matrix verb. It will be proposed that the embedded clause refers to an utterance in a previous discourse and is identified as the content of the true complement to the matrix verb, namely a null nominal. The paper then concludes with directions for future research. 2. Data 2.1. Key features of EIQs EIQs have most famously been studied by McCloskey (1992, 2006) and Henry (1995) in Hiberno English dialects. They also occur in a range of other British and non-British dialects, including North West England English (Woods, 2014), African American English (AAE; Green, 2002), Indian English (Bhatt, 2000) and New York English (C. Sailor and B. Pearson, p.c.). Their most salient features are the presence of subject-auxiliary inversion in an embedded clause and the (general) lack of overt complementisers. Example (1) contains paradigm examples of the EIQ construction, which can contain either a polar or wh-question: (1) a. I asked Jack was she in his class. b. I wondered how did they get into the building. Irish English, McCloskey (2006) EIQs have a highly restricted distribution. They typically appear under interrogative bridge verbs like those in (1) but are blocked under factive verbs (as in (2)); a state of affairs reminiscent of embedded verb second (EV2) contexts in Germanic. (2) *I found out how did they get into the building. Irish Eng., McCloskey (2006) * Rebecca Woods, University of York, UK. This research is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/J500215/1) and the presentation in Vancouver was supported by the UK’s Philological Society. I am grateful to the following people for their intellectual assistance: George Tsoulas, Norman Yeo, Maria- Margarita Makri, Eytan Zweig and the Syntax and Semantics Research Group at the University of York; audiences at UMass’s Language Acquisition Research Center, especially Peggy Speas and Tom Roeper, MIT’s Syntax Square and the University of Toronto’s Syntax Project, especially Diane Massam and Bronwyn Bj¨ orkman; and of course the audience at WCCFL 33, especially Sonja Thoma, Patrick Elliott and Jon Ander Mendia. Needless to say, all errors are mine. © 2016 Rebecca Woods. Proceedings of the 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. Kyeong-min Kim et al., 417-426. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.