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What is the name of a structure that usually contains "how" or "what" and inverted word order but is not a question?

Example: "Our goal is to investigate until we know how it was done".

shin
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daniel.sedlacek
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    This is a free relative clause or fused relative clause. Some authorities distinguish specific uses of this construction as embedded questions. – StoneyB on hiatus Mar 08 '17 at 12:50
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    @StoneyB How about if it had said "whether it was done"? – Araucaria - Not here any more. Mar 08 '17 at 14:07
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    @Araucaria I've never been convinced by the distinction between free relatives and embedded questions--or for that matter bound relatives. Internally, it's exactly the same construction, regardless of its external syntactic role. Do we give different names to noun phrases when they're subjects, complements, obliques, appositives? – StoneyB on hiatus Mar 08 '17 at 16:30
  • @StoneyB But do they have the same internal structure? Hmmm .... – Araucaria - Not here any more. Mar 08 '17 at 16:38
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    @Araucaria Indeed they do! Here's the relevant part of Santorini's respected textbook on syntax. "The wh- relative pronoun moves to Spec(CP), and the syntactic head of the clause is a silent complementizer, just as in an indirect question." – eijen Mar 08 '17 at 17:26
  • @eijen Nice! :-) However, a) where's the fused relatives there? b) that's not the only/necessarily best analysis available. c) for example, how'd you account for whether interrogatives? – Araucaria - Not here any more. Mar 09 '17 at 10:08
  • @StoneyB: I think you answered your own question. Subjects, complements, etc. are different names for different types of noun phrases. Calling this a free fused relative clause would be oxymoronic, so I think that means the sentence is just not in a proper formal style and finding a formal name for it is useless. – Hector von Apr 04 '17 at 12:08
  • It's also an adverbial relative clause, if that's what it's called. Wikipedia isn't quite clear on that – Hector von Apr 04 '17 at 12:10
  • @Hectorvon (1) Subject, complement, &c are names for different syntactic roles, not different constructions. (2) NP is not quite the same thing as noun phrase, though the first arose from loose use of the second. (3) Nobody's proposing to call this construction a free fused relative clause--those are just alternative names. (4) What?! There's nothing improper about the sentence: it's perfectly acceptable in any register. – StoneyB on hiatus Apr 04 '17 at 12:54
  • Your example doesn't match your title and description: "how it was done" does not have inverted word order. (The version with inversion would be "How was it done?") – ruakh Apr 12 '17 at 01:39

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In the sentence "Our goal is to investigate until we know how it was done" the bold part is a free relative clause (nominal relative clause, a fused relative construction, an independent relative clause, or (in traditional grammar) a noun clause); a type of relative clause (that is, a word group beginning with a wh-word) that contains the antecedent within itself.

A free relative can refer to people or things, and it can function as a subject, a complement, or an object.

SovereignSun
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