echo question

A type of direct question that repeats part or all of something which someone else has just said.

See also:

• Conversation Analysis
• Interrogative Sentence
• Question
• Speech Act
• Twelve Types of Questions in Casablanca

Examples and Observations:

• Telemachus: We're waiting for Odysseus to come home.
  Antinuous: You're waiting for who to do what?
  (Albert Ramsdell Gurney, The Comeback, 1993)



• Mary: What do you want?
  George Bailey: What do I want? Why, I'm just here to get warm, that's all!
  (It's a Wonderful Life, 1946)



• "I used to play checkers with her all the time."
  
  "You used to play what with her all the time?"
  
  "Checkers."
  (Holden Caulfield and Stradlater in The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, 1951)



• "We use echo questions either because we did not fully hear or understand what was said, or because its content is too surprising to be believed. For example:

  (It cost £5,000.) HOW much did it cost?
  (His son's an osteopath.) His son's a WHAT?

  Echo questions are usually spoken with a rising intonation, and with a strong emphasis on the wh-word (what, who, how and so on)."
  (Geoffrey Leech, A Glossary of Grammar Terms. Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2006)



• "[C]onsider the following dialogue:

  (4)
  SPEAKER A: He had said someone would do something
  SPEAKER B: He had said who would do what?

  In (4), speaker B largely echoes what speaker A says, except for replacing someone by who and something by what. For obvious reasons, the type of question produced by speaker B in (4) is called an echo question. However, speaker B could alternatively have replied with a non-echo question like that below:

  (5)
  Who had he said would do what?

  If we compare the echo question He had said who would do what? in (4) with the corresponding non-echo question Who had he said would do what? in (5), we find that (5) involves two movement operations which are not found in (4). One is an auxiliary inversion operation by which the past-tense auxiliary had is moved in front of its subject he. . . . The other is a wh-movement operation by which the wh-word who is moved to the front of the overall sentence, and positioned in front of had."
  (Andrew Radford, English Syntax: An Introduction. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004)