Displacement in Syntax

Displacement is a ubiquitous phenomenon in natural languages. Grammarians often speak of displacement in cases where the rules for the canonical word order of a language lead to the expectation of finding a word or phrase in a particular position in the sentence whereas it surfaces instead in a different position and the canonical position remains empty: ‘Which book did you buy?’ is an example of displacement because the noun phrase ‘which book’, which acts as the grammatical object in the question, does not occur in the canonical object position, which in English is after the verb. Instead, it surfaces at the beginning of the sentence and the object position remains empty. Displacement is often used as a diagnostic for constituent structure because it affects only (but not all) constituents. In the clear cases, displaced constituents show properties associated with two distinct linear and hierarchical positions. Typically, one of these two positions c-commands the other and the displaced element is pronounced in the c-commanding position. Displacement also shows strong interactions with the path between the empty canonical position and the position where the element is pronounced: one often encounters morphological changes along this path and evidence for structural placement of the displaced constituent, as well as constraints on displacement induced by the path. The exact scope of displacement as an analytically unified phenomenon varies from theory to theory. If more then one type of syntactic displacement is recognized, the question of the interaction between movement types arises. Displacement phenomena are extensively studied by syntacticians. Their enduring interest derives from the fact that the complex interactions between displacement and other aspects of syntax offer a powerful probe into the inner workings and architecture of the human syntactic faculty

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

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

On the Syntax of Multiple Sluicing and What It Tells Us about Wh-Scope Taking

Across many languages multiple sluicing obeys a clause-mate constraint. This can be understood on the empirically well-supported assumption that covert phrasal wh-movement is clause-bounded and subject to superiority. We provide independent evidence for syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and for locality constraints on movement operations within the ellipsis site. The fact that the distribution of multiple sluicing is substantially narrower than that of multiple wh-questions, on their single-pair as well as their pairlist reading, entails that there must be mechanisms for scoping in-situ wh-phrases that do not rely on covert phrasal wh-movement. We adopt the choice functional account for single-pair readings. For pair-list readings, we develop a novel functional analysis, argue for the functional basis of pair-list readings, and present a new perspective on pair-list readings of questions with quantifiers

Syntax

This chapter examines the question of what limits there are in the way in which languages can differ from each other structurally. Whenever we utter a sentence in any language, the words come in a particular order and are grouped into phrases in a particular way. While it is obvious that words in a sentence are ordered, the organization into phrases is less obvious, often imperceptible. This chapter argues that the variation between languages is largely confined to perceptible properties of word order, while the imperceptible organization into phrases is the same – or very nearly so – in all languages. Whether this view is true and, if so, why, is at the heart of some of the most fundamental debates in linguistics with implications for all of cognitive science. The chapter starts by motivating the existence of abstract phrase structure and by outlining what kinds of facts the syntactic description of a language must account for. A sufficiently explicit discussion requires some technical tools and notions, which will be introduced. The chapter then explains the goals of a general syntactic theory: to delimit and explain the range of variation found in human languages. This is followed by a case study of the word order found in noun phrases across languages. The case study focuses on the idea that languages differ in word order but resemble each other in phrasal organization

On “sluicing” with apparent massive pied-piping

This paper provides the first detailed description of a type of elliptical wh-question 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

Word Order

This chapter discusses different theories of free word order alternations that commonly go by the name of scrambling. The main example discussed here is Mittelfeld scrambling in German. The chapter argues that scrambling is a genuinely syntactic process with reflexes both in the phonology (word order) and the semantics (binding and scope). The chapter then briefly introduces the three approaches to scrambling that have dominated the literature: trace-based accounts, base generation accounts, linearization-based accounts. Their main strengths and weaknesses are outlined and the most important lines of debate are sketched. The conclusion briefly turns to non-configurationality

On the interaction of P-stranding and Sluicing in Bulgarian

The paper shows that the interaction between preposition stranding, case morphology, and sluicing in the Bulgarian of – at least – some speakers strongly supports an account of sluicing under which (a) the intuitively missing part of the question is syntactically represented, (b) the missing part of the sentence is elided under semantic rather than syntactic identity with the antecedent, and (c) the pronounced wh-phrase has to fit in a specific sense discussed in the paper into the antecedent. Assumptions (a) and (b) constitute Merchant’s approach to sluicing. As pointed out by Lasnik, (a) and (b) by themselves do not derive important, well-established, central properties of sluicing. Assumption (c) is intended to fix this gap in Merchant’s account. The conjunction of (a), (b), and (c) makes novel predictions not shared by competing accounts of sluicing like a Lasnik-style syntactic identity account or a Culicover-and-Jackendoff-style account with no syntax at the ellipsis site. The Bulgarian data presented here show that the specific expectations of the present account are borne out, giving it the empirical edge over its competitors