Constraints on ellipsis alternation: A view from the history of English

Abstract

I offer a diachronic perspective on English ellipsis alternation, or the alternation between inclusion and omission of prepositions from remnants under sluicing and bare argument ellipsis. The relative freedom to omit prepositions from remnants has not been stable in English; this freedom is connected to the strength of semantic dependencies between prepositions and verbs. Remnants without prepositions are first attested, but remain less frequent than remnants with prepositions, as late as Early Modern English and gain in frequency following this period. I demonstrate that three constraints—correlate informativity, structural persistence, and construction type—predict ellipsis alternation in Early and Late Modern English. However, predicting ellipsis alternation in present-day English requires semantic dependencies in addition to the three constraints. The constraints can be subsumed under principles of language processing and production (considerations of accessibility, a tendency to reuse structure, and a conventionalized performance preference for efficiently accessing constituents that form processing domains), permitting a unified processing account of ellipsis alternation with cross-linguistic coverage.

English is (still) a West Germanic language

“…E&F present no actual historical data in this section; however, in Nykiel's (2015) study of the diachrony of sluicing in English, she finds no examples of preposition omission under sluicing from the Middle English period, as opposed to twenty-three examples in which the preposition is overt, such as (13). Apparently, the split infinitive has a somewhat unstable history in English.…”

Preposition stranding and ellipsis alternation

“…There is evidence that mismatch in such content degrades the acceptability of sluicing, whether or not ellipsis alternation is involved, as in (12)-(13) (Dayal & Schwarzschild 2010;Nykiel 2013b Further, independent evidence shows that matching contentful correlates and remnants (lexical NPs and which-NP phrases) are found more acceptable than matching noncontentful ones (indefinite pronouns and bare wh-phrases) in English sluicing with appositive antecedents, as in 14 If the acceptability contrast between contentful and noncontentful correlates and remnants is a general characteristic of sluicing, it is not surprising to find it in ellipsis alternation. In fact, this contrast has been reported in ellipsis alternation beyond Spanish: French, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Czech, Russian, and Early and Late Modern English (Stjepanović 2008;Szczegielniak 2008;Rodrigues et al 2009;Caha 2011;Sag & Nykiel 2011;Nykiel 2013aNykiel , 2015Tatiana Philippova p.c.). 3 This list suggests that a larger generalization can be made about why ellipsis alternation is not merely a characteristic of preposition-stranding languages.…”

English fragments, Minimize Domains, and Minimize Forms

“…When the fragment's correlate hosts a lexical NP, and not a pronoun, that fragment is more likely to surface as an NP than a PP (Nykiel, 2015(Nykiel, , 2017, hence (21B) is more probable than To who(m). This preference for lexical NP antecedents over indefinite pronouns with NP fragments has been reported in several cross-linguistic studies of clausal ellipsis (see Caha, 2011, for Czech;Rodrigues et al, 2009, for Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and French;Stjepanovic, 2008, for Serbo-Croatian;Szczegielniak, 2008;Sag & Nykiel, 2011;Nykiel, 2013, for Polish).…”

“…An interesting further aspect of this development is that the frequency of prepositional verbs more than doubles after Early Modern English (Biber, Johannsson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999). It is also after this period that the proportion of NP fragments to PP fragments under ellipsis rises (Nykiel, 2014(Nykiel, , 2015, setting Modern English apart from earlier English and from so many other languages as well. 12 The explanatory question this raises is: Can it be shown that the much larger number of semantic dependencies now holding between verbs and prepositions is actually responsible for more NP fragments in present-day English?…”

“…This research raises questions about the general status of P-drop. It appears to be a fairly limited phenomenon in each language that exhibits it while at the same time being widespread in present-day English (Nykiel, 2015(Nykiel, , 2017, making English stand out as exceptional. We will see that corpus data from spoken English corroborate the familiar English pattern: the frequency of NP fragments is higher than that of PP fragments.…”