Speaker: Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (KU Brussels)
Title: Ellipsis and accommodation: the (morphological) case of
sluicing
Time: Friday, April 3, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141
>In this talk I examine instances of sluicing whereby the ellipsis site is not
structurally isomorphic to its antecedent. The data are presented in three incremental
steps: (1) copular clauses can be used in sluicing to circumvent preposition stranding
violations in non- preposition stranding languages; (2) such copular rescue is blocked in
languages with morphological case marking; (3) this blocking is overruled when (a) the
underlying copular clause is case-sensitive, or (b) the sluiced wh-phrase is syncretic
between the case assigned by the preposition and the case found in a copular clause. As
none of the existing constraints on accommodation of ellipsis antecedents (Fox 1999,
2000; Sauerland 2004; Hardt 2004, 2005) can account for this data pattern, I propose a
new constraint, which states that an ellipsis remnant has to be in the licensing
potential (cf. Chung, Ladusaw and McCloskey 1995) of both the actual and the
accommodated antecedent. This proposal will be shown to receive support from
pragmatically controlled sluicing and the interaction between spading and morphological
case in dialect Dutch.