Preposition stranding and ellipsis alternation

Nykiel, Joanna

doi:10.1017/s1360674315000477

Cited by 29 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…When a prepositional object follows the head, as in (32A), the probability that a subsequent fragment will surface as an NP is lower. These correspondence patterns have been observed in the English corpus data reported in Nykiel (2015Nykiel ( , 2017. We can think of them as reflecting a reuse of whatever structure was employed in the fragment's correlate, part of the general mechanism known as priming or structural persistence (see Nykiel, 2017, for discussion).…”

Section: Correspondence Effectmentioning

confidence: 57%

“…Fragments behave as expected with respect to the English preference for NPs over PPs (see Table 5). However, reprise utterances and split questions do not (see Nykiel, 2015Nykiel, , 2017.…”

Section: Construction Typementioning

confidence: 99%

“…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).…”

Section: M I F a N D E N V I R O N M E N T S F A C I L I T A T I mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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English fragments, Minimize Domains, and Minimize Forms

Nykiel

Hawkins

2020

Lang. cogn.

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We offer an account of preposition drop under clausal ellipsis in terms of two language processing principles: Minimize Domains and Minimize Forms. We argue that when Minimize Domains operates within the PP domain, it disfavors preposition drop due to the preferred independent processability of the PP fragment. When it operates within the VP domain it favors preposition drop in proportion to the number and strength of semantic dependencies between V and P in a given language: the more dependencies there are, and the stronger they are, the stronger the preference for preposition drop. In this way fragments are avoided with long dependencies between P and a distant V. We demonstrate this pattern in English corpora and propose it as an explanation for the typologically unusual preference that English shows for NP fragments. Minimize Forms supports preposition drop in easy-to-process environments cross-linguistically and in English when the more minimal fragment (NP) can be easily linked to its correlate in the antecedent, disfavoring preposition drop elsewhere. The predictions of Minimize Domains and Minimize Forms receive support from a mixed-effects regression model fitted to data from spoken US English, and can be understood as motivations for construction-specific constraints and preferences in clausal ellipsis.

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Section: Correspondence Effectmentioning

confidence: 57%

“…Fragments behave as expected with respect to the English preference for NPs over PPs (see Table 5). However, reprise utterances and split questions do not (see Nykiel, 2015Nykiel, , 2017.…”

Section: Construction Typementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: M I F a N D E N V I R O N M E N T S F A C I L I T A T I mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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English fragments, Minimize Domains, and Minimize Forms

Nykiel

Hawkins

2020

Lang. cogn.

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“…The idea is that less informative and structurally less complex remnants are dispreferred in examples of OPUS compared to more informative and structurally more complex remnants. Nykiel supports this claim based on qualitative comments in the syntactic literature, on her own (2013a) work on Polish (though see footnote 4 above for reasons to be skeptical), as well as corpus work on contemporary (Nykiel 2017) and previous stages of English (Nykiel 2015). It is difficult to judge the relevance of this factor for sluicing based on Nykiel's corpus data, since the effect of what we will call informativity is only reported for the entire corpus which is heavily skewed towards fragment answers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Resumption as a sluicing source in Saudi Arabic: Evidence from sluicing with prepositional phrases

Alshaalan¹,

Abels²

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper reports the results of three acceptability judgment experiments on Saudi Arabic elliptical questions (sluicing) with prepositional phrases. We show that in standard cases of merger type sluicing and contrastive sluicing there is no penalty for leaving out the preposition. Under an analysis of sluicing with syntactic identity between antecedent and ellipsis site, such examples require preposition stranding in the ellipsis site. We call this pattern OPUS, which the reader is invited to interpret as an abbreviation, depending on their theoretical predilections, as Ostensible P-stranding Under Sluicing or as Omission of Preposition Under Sluicing. Our findings show that Saudi Arabic violates Merchant's ( 2001) second form identity generalization. Further experiments reveal that the status of the examples depends on the status of the most acceptable synonymous source within the ellipsis site; in particular, when neither a cleft structure nor a resumptive structure are grammatically available in the ellipsis site, the acceptability of OPUS decays. We interpret this as evidence that there is syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and that the wh-remnant in these elliptical questions can -and sometimes must -relate to a resumptive pronoun in the ellipsis site.

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On “sluicing” with apparent massive pied-piping

Abels¹

2018

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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This paper provides the first detailed description of a type of elliptical whquestion first noted in a footnote in Ross's seminal paper on sluicing. Under certain, very restricted circumstances, sluicing appears to be able to tolerate wh-phrases with massive pied-piping. I propose to analyze this pattern in terms of (recursive) contrastive left-dislocation accompanied by clausal ellipsis. While it has long been known that contrastive left-dislocation can be recursive, the particular ellipsis pattern observed here has not been described in detail before. The proposed analysis capitalizes on the striking distributional similarities between the apparent sluicing pattern and the pattern of clausal ellipsis with contrastive left-dislocation. At a theoretical level, the paper provides a defense of wh-move-and-delete approaches to sluicing by removing Ross's nagging counterexample to the generalization that only wh-movable constituents can be sluicing remnants. Keywords Ellipsis • Sluicing • In-situ theory of ellipsis • Contrastive left-dislocation • German • English • Move-and-delete theory of ellipsis 2 This is not the place to decide what the correct analysis of apparent P-stranding under sluicing is.

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Preposition stranding and ellipsis alternation

Cited by 29 publications

References 51 publications

English fragments, Minimize Domains, and Minimize Forms

English fragments, Minimize Domains, and Minimize Forms

Resumption as a sluicing source in Saudi Arabic: Evidence from sluicing with prepositional phrases

On “sluicing” with apparent massive pied-piping

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