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I am Miguel, whose first language is Japanese. This time, I have very naive or trivial question on pied-piping in English.

It seems to be said that the pied-piping takes place more often in relative clauses than in question sentences. My question is to what extent English native speakers allow pied-piping in wh-questions. I made several examples. If possible, could you grade these examples?

  1. I heard bad information according to which my grandmother passed away.
  2. I don't know the picture of who(m) John likes.
  3. I don't know of whom John likes the picture.
  4. I don't know whom John likes the picture of.
  5. I wonder after which party John went to the hotel.
  6. I wonder which party John went to the hotel after.
  7. The picture of whom does John like?
  8. Of whom does John like the picture?
  9. Who(m) does John like the picture of?
  10. After which party did John go to the hotel?
  11. Which party did John go to the hotel?

If the sentence is completely acceptable, grade it as 5. If it is totally unacceptable, assign 1.

example: (1) 5, (2) 2, (3) .....

This question asks your acceptability, but not formal grammaticalness. Even if you think that is prescriptive, as long as you can accept the sentence, grade it higher.

I am very looking forward to hearing your answer!

herisson
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  • I'm afraid questions of opinion are off-topic on all SE sites. – StoneyB on hiatus Mar 22 '17 at 11:55
  • I had to look up pied-piping as it applies to this context. Is there even a gradient? From a brief look at the wikipedia article I linked, it seems to be a binary thing - either it's pied-piped or it isn't. – Lawrence Mar 22 '17 at 13:01
  • @Lawrence: The gradient described in the question is for acceptability, not for whether or not it is pied-piping. Miguel is asking how acceptable each example is. I think it is a good question, although perhaps a bit long. It will require a somewhat extensive discussion for a good answer. – herisson Mar 22 '17 at 22:39
  • @StoneyB: Linguistic acceptability is not primarily a matter of opinion; it is a verifiable scientific fact. If you are unfamiliar with the concept, please read the following blog post: Acceptability Judgements – herisson Mar 22 '17 at 22:41
  • I think 1 and 5 may be marginally acceptable(2). The others, not(1). – GEdgar Mar 22 '17 at 22:42
  • @sumelic I see what you mean now. I initially interpreted the question as "to what extent do people consider these to be pied-piped questions", that is, "allow"ing the piped-piped form into questions. Reinterpreting the question along the lines you mention, pied-piping becomes part of the motivation for the question, but the question itself requests a grading that doesn't depend on knowing what pied-piping means. In that case: 10 (10) e.g. if asked by a police officer given a context of multiple parties; 1, 4, 5 are barely acceptable (2); I'd rate the rest unacceptable (1). – Lawrence Mar 22 '17 at 22:56
  • @sumelic It's a poll: OP doesn't ask for established judgments, but for our individual judgments--that is, our several opinions. These indeed may be aggregated, tentatively, as the sort of Acceptability Judgment the post you link discusses ; but there would be serious questions about the relevance of the sample. – StoneyB on hiatus Mar 22 '17 at 23:49
  • (Most of the Miguels I know are Spanish or Portuguese not Japanese) This question will likely be closed as a poll question, but I can report that all the pied-piping versions are completely unnatural and virtually unheard in actual speech by native speakers. – tchrist Mar 23 '17 at 02:06
  • The issue of pied-piping seems to be how the wh-word pulls with it a modifier. 
        a. She bought the red house.
    b. Which house did she buy ___? - The interrogative word which has pied-piped the noun house.
    c. *Which did she buy ___ house? - The sentence is bad because pied-piping has not occurred.

    Thus, what difference does it make whether we rate these good or bad? (I'd accept only #10).

     – Xanne Mar 23 '17 at 02:40
  • I might have agreed with GEdgar but if 5 is acceptable then how could 6 or 10 not be? Either way, I think sumelic is more than largely correct about acceptability, further to which it doesn’t seem to me to matter whether it’s a ‘poll’ question. Either one person comes up with a definitive answer that everyone else accepts or it’s a question of opinion, however well-informed.

    Like Lawrence I had to look up ‘pied-piping.’ I confess, I found Wikipedia's explanation of pied-piping wholly impenetrable; to the extent I could imagine interpretations with meaning, wholly pointless.

    More…

     – Robbie Goodwin Apr 01 '17 at 20:54
  • If it’s true that in ‘Which house did she buy ___?’ the interrogative has pied-piped the noun, that seems to be because the commentator wanted more to coign a new phrase than to accept a structure nearly everyone else recognized.

    Either way, what on Earth is that ‘buy ___?’ doing, please? Wasn’t ‘Which house did she buy?’ complete as it stood? What could any replacement for ‘___’ possibly contribute?

    More…

     – Robbie Goodwin Apr 01 '17 at 20:54
  • Wikipedia seems to present the b. question as a re-structuring of the a. statement, which would be to say that generally, questions are re-structurings of statements… true on the same level that statements are re-structurings of questions; equally, otherwise meaningless.

    Slightly different doubts apply to the relationship between c. question ‘Which did she buy ___ house?’ and either the b. question or the a. statement but the conclusion ‘The sentence is bad because pied-piping has not occurred’ seems worse than a desire to coign a phrase where none is needed.

    Thanks for your patience

     – Robbie Goodwin Apr 01 '17 at 20:56

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