6.1. COMPARISONS, PREFERENCES AND CHOICE 2756.1.2 Open choices
If you want to have a larger collection of items to choose from, or you want
to ask a categorical choice, then cannot be used. Instead, a choice paĴern
involving ...
, meaning ”from amongst ...” must be used. This pat-
tern can be used for anything, such as specific lists of items, or just categor-
ical nouns asking the person who is offered the choice to pick something
that falls into the category. For instance:A:
B:A: ”Music-wise, what do you like?” (literally: ”from music, what do
you like?”)
B: ”Hmm. I like Jazz.”This is an example of a categorical choice where the respondent ac-
tually gives a specific answer. Questions like ”What food do you like”,
”which cars are fast” fit this paĴern.
There is an exception to using this paĴern which involves open
choices for locations, such as ”Which cities in Europe have you been to”: as
is already a marker for location, the part is dropped when asking
location questions:
”Which cities in Europe have you been to?”Similar to the binary choice, it might be that none of the choices
are good, or that they’re all equally fine. Instead of using /
/ , for this particular paĴern / are used, to indicate
’everything’ or ’nothing’ depending on the verb form that follows being
positive or negative:
A:
B:
C:A: ”Which foods are tasty?”
B: ”I don’t think there’s anything particularly tasty about food.”
C: ”Everything’s tasty!”