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

Summary

The paper asks whether elided questions (sluicing) contain hidden syntactic structure. It tests this with Saudi Arabic sluices in which the wh-remnant appears without the preposition that its correlate carries in the antecedent. The authors call this pattern OPUS. They ran three acceptability judgment experiments with native speakers, comparing elliptical and full questions, merger and contrast sluices, and the remnants where and when.

Dropping the preposition carried no penalty when a grammatical full-question source was available. That source can be a question with a resumptive pronoun. When neither a cleft nor a resumptive source was possible, as with when, acceptability fell. Saudi Arabic therefore breaks Merchant's (2001) generalization that P-stranding under sluicing tracks P-stranding under ordinary wh-movement.

The authors conclude that the ellipsis site holds real syntactic structure. That structure need not copy the antecedent, and it can include resumption. The result offers a way out of the deadlock between structural and non-structural theories of ellipsis.

Key points

  • Three acceptability judgment experiments on Saudi Arabic sluicing with PPs (Glossa 5(1): 8, 2020). Participants were recruited through King Saud University.
  • OPUS stands for Ostensible P-stranding Under Sluicing, or alternatively Omission of Preposition Under Sluicing. In both merger-type and contrast sluicing it showed no penalty compared with keeping the preposition.
  • In Saudi Arabic non-elliptical questions, every nominal wh-phrase and where allow resumption, whereas when does not. Optional resumptives did not lower acceptability.
  • Experiment 3 found that OPUS with when is degraded. It is still much better than the corresponding overt non-elliptical sentence, which counts as an ellipsis amelioration effect.
  • The predictions of Nykiel's non-structural model were not reliably borne out:
    • The informativity effect was small and failed to replicate.
    • No structural persistence effect appeared.
    • A robust wh-type effect showed up where her model predicted none.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Instead of measuring how far a hidden structure is from its antecedent, the authors test whether any well-formed source exists, and check for a penalty when none does. This is a cleaner existence test for latent structure. — For Mova (frames): When resolving ellipsis or fragment answers, prag could list candidate reconstructed clauses (including paraphrases and resumptive forms) and flag a sluice as poorly supported when no candidate parses well.
  • I2. The paper uses minimal-pair contrasts (where vs when, elliptical vs full) so that one factor switches source availability on and off. This separates competing theories that otherwise both claim the same data. — For Mova (learn): Evaluation suites could include paired items where only the availability of a valid reconstruction changes, as a negative control showing the parser really depends on that reconstruction.
  • I3. The reconstructed source does not have to be isomorphic to the antecedent; a semantically equivalent paraphrase is enough. — For Mova (tree): An ellipsis-filling step after UD parsing could try semantically equivalent variants of the antecedent (e.g. a PP vs a bare DP plus pronoun), instead of copying only the exact antecedent subtree.
  • I4. Contrast sluices ("what else") are used to rule out cleft sources that merger sluices leave open. Picking constructions that eliminate a confound is a reusable design trick. — For Mova (answer): Test sets for QA on tales could add "who else / what else" questions, which force real reconstruction of the elided clause instead of matching a single correlate.
  • I5. An effect that is small and fails to replicate in a follow-up is treated as a likely false positive, not as support. — For Mova (learn): Self-induced repair rules should be kept only if their gain replicates on a fresh held-out slice, not just on the batch where they were discovered.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cited by

3 papers of our library cite it (of the 140884 whose bibliographies we read); 1 of them have a page here, 2 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.841

@article{alshaalan2020resumption,
  title = {{Resumption as a sluicing source in Saudi Arabic: Evidence from sluicing with prepositional phrases}},
  author = {Alshaalan, Yara and Abels, Klaus},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.841},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.841}
}

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  64. How to cite this article: Alshaalan, Yara and Klaus Abels. 2020. Resumption as a sluicing source in Saudi Arabic: Evidence from sluicing with prepositional phrases. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5(1): 8. 1–36. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.841 ↗ our card
  65. Submitted: 16 October 2018 find
  66. Accepted: 27 October 2019 find
  67. Published: 20 January 2020 find
  68. Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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