Polish newcomers acquiring questions and questioning in a local dialect

Corrigan, KP; Robinson, M

doi:10.1515/9783111426280-009

Polish newcomers acquiring questions and questioning in a local dialect

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Karen Corrigan ORCiD, Dr Mary Robinson ORCiD

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Abstract

© 2026 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston, Genthiner Straße 13, 10785 Berlin. This chapter uses a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews to investigate usage of inversion in embedded questions in Northern Irish English by both local and Polish newcomer youngsters. The current study is presented in the context of the origins of the construction in Northern Irish English, as well as parallel constructions in Polish. We show that the biggest predictor of inversion is question type, whereby yes/no questions are inverted more often in embedded contexts than wh-questions are, and argue that this empirical finding favours a theoretical analysis that treats the two question types as syntactically distinct. We then discuss our findings in the context of language acquisition in multilingual settings.