[General] Who do you want to get help from?

[Silverobama]

Two kids were going to play a game. One needed to use the last letter of a word the other kid said to start a new word. Before they began playing the game, Boy C said "I can help you, A". But no one helped Boy B. So I said to B that he could find one person to help him and then I added "Who do you want to get help from?"

Is my question natural? B replies "How about you heling me?"

 

[Phaedrus]

Two kids were going to play a game. One needed to use the last letter of a word the other kid said to start a new word. Before they began playing the game, Boy C said "I can help you, A". But no one helped Boy B. So I [STRIKE]said to[/STRIKE] told B that he could find one person to help him and then I added "Who do you want to get help from?"

Is my question natural? B replies "How about you helping me?"

"Who do you want to get help from?" works, but "Who do you want to help you?" would be more natural.

(No, I won't even say that "whom" is possible in both questions, since "whom" would sound horribly formal in each.)

Interestingly, in spoken English, "wanna" (contraction of "want" and "to") would work in your sentence, but not in the revision I have suggested -- for complicated reasons.

 

[tzfujimino]

Interestingly, in spoken English, "wanna" (contraction of "want" and "to") would work in your sentence, but not in the revision I have suggested -- for complicated reasons.

1a) Do you want to get help from 'X'?
The element 'X' becomes 'who' and then fronted:
1b) Who do you want to get help from ............?

2a) Do you want 'X' to help you?
Again, the element 'X' is changed into 'who' and then fronted:
2b) Who do you want ............ to help you?

In 2b, there's a gap between "want" and "to", and therefore "wanna" wouldn't work there.

I think that's what you mean.
(I hope I'm correct. I've tried my best!)

 

[Phaedrus]

Yes, that's right, tzfujimino. I like how you've put it in terms of "gaps"; that keeps things fairly simple.

Things get more "complicated" -- and more controversial -- when we talk about things like wh-traces inhabiting those gaps, such that the reason contraction is blocked in (2b) is that a wh-trace is sitting there blocking it, like syntactic dark matter.

It was George Lakoff who, in 1970, noticed this phenomenon first. (But the original discoverer may have been Lawrence Horn.) That was before trace theory. His explanation was that "want to cannot contract to wanna if there is an intervening NP [noun phrase] at an earlier point in the derivation." His famous examples were these:

(3a) Teddy is the man I want to succeed.
(3b) Teddy is the man I wanna succeed.

Sentence (3a), he observed, is ambiguous. It admits of both an altruistic reading, on which it relates to "I want Teddy to succeed," and an ambitious reading, on which it relates to "I want to succeed Teddy."

But (3b) is unambiguous (for almost all English speakers); it only has the ambitious reading, because the impossibility of to-contraction across the gap or trace rules out the possibility of the altruistic reading. The explanation has been controversial, though. Pullum attempted an alternate explanation in 1997 (see here).