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Preposition stranding and ellipsis alternation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2016

JOANNA NYKIEL
JOANNA NYKIEL*
Affiliation:
English Department, University of Silesia, Grota-Roweckiego 5, Sosnowiec 41-200, Polandjoanna.nykiel@us.edu.pl
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Abstract

Ellipsis alternation refers here to the alternation between two kinds of ellipsis remnants whose correlates are prepositional phrases. One kind of remnant includes the preposition hosted by its correlate and the other doesn't. This alternation is now known to be cross-linguistically widespread although it was originally assumed to be banned in languages without preposition stranding under wh-movement. I argue that there is a nonsyntactic relationship between ellipsis alternation and preposition stranding that helps explain the availability and distribution of both types of remnants in terms of general performance preferences. Two pieces of corpus evidence from English are offered in support of this argument. The first piece of evidence reveals that the content of a remnant and its correlate affects ellipsis alternation both in languages without preposition stranding and in English. The second piece of evidence shows that the availability of preposition stranding in English nonelliptical clauses supports the use of prepositionless remnants via structural persistence, that is, reuse of syntactic structure found in antecedent clauses. These data lead me to conclude that ellipsis alternation is subject to a stronger processing constraint in English than in languages without preposition stranding.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 27 - 45
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

1

This work benefited from helpful suggestions by two anonymous ELL reviewers, and from thoughtful discussions with Ivan A. Sag, Joan Bresnan and Jason Merchant. I am also grateful to colleagues at Stanford University and UC Davis for comments on many of the ideas presented here. Special thanks go to John A. Hawkins for comments on an earlier draft and for long hours discussing syntactic variation with me. The research presented here was supported by the American Philosophical Society and by the Polish Ministry of Education under grant no. NN 104 097538

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