Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2007 / Multiple Sluicing in English

Multiple Sluicing in English

Paper · 2007 · Myung-Kwan Park and Jung-Min Kang

Summary

English normally fronts only one wh-phrase. Yet sentences such as Bolinger's "But which for which" seem to leave two wh-remnants after a clause is elided. Nishigauchi (1998) and Lasnik (2007) analysed these as Gapping. In their view, the first wh-phrase sits at the left clause edge, the second is shifted rightward by focus movement, and the material in between is gapped. Park and Kang reject this. They argue that English multiple sluicing is the same construction found in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian: both wh-phrases front to the CP edge, and the TP beneath them is deleted. Using judgment data, they show three mismatches with Gapping:

  • its contextual restrictions do not carry over;
  • Gapping allows non-wh second remnants;
  • phrases that resist rightward shift can still serve as second remnants.

Lasnik tied the clause-boundedness of the construction to the Right Roof Constraint. The authors instead derive it from scope parallelism between antecedent and ellipsis, combined with the pair-list reading, in which the first wh-phrase acts as a local universal distributor. The result bears on theories of ellipsis and wh-interpretation.

Key points

  • The data are acceptability judgments on constructed English sentences, drawn from Bolinger (1978), Nishigauchi (1998) and Lasnik (2007). They are compared with Bulgarian (Richards 1997) and Serbo-Croatian (Stjepanovic 2003) multiple sluices.
  • The documented properties are:
    • the second remnant must be a PP or a heavy DP, and light DPs degrade;
    • a non-wh second remnant is impossible;
    • the elided part must be a simple clause, not one spanning a finite clause boundary.
  • Gapping (per Johnson 1996/2003) fails in "but" clauses, adjunct clauses and non-parallel embeddings. Multiple sluicing, by contrast, appears in "but" and embedded clauses.
  • Exceptionally Case-marked phrases cannot shift rightward, yet they can still be second remnants, e.g. "[which] [behind which tree]". This cuts against the Gapping account.
  • The locality explanation relies on three things:
    • Comorovski (1996): in a pair-list reading, the first wh-phrase has universal force and is D-linked;
    • quantifiers are clause-bound, and indefinites take scope in one step (May 1985);
    • a scope parallelism condition on ellipsis.
  • Parallel facts come from Dayal (2002) and Sloan (1991): pair-list readings are lost across a finite clause.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Rebuild an elided clause by copying the antecedent TP and treating each remnant as a fronted phrase that binds a gap inside it; this gives a deterministic, explainable reconstruction.
  • I2. Each wh-remnant pairs with an indefinite correlate in the antecedent (e.g., "one of the students" ↔ "which"), so resolving the sluice means matching remnants to correlates by category and preposition.
  • I3. Two-wh sluices resolve only against the smallest clause containing both correlates, not a larger embedding clause.
  • I4. The pair-list reading treats the first wh-phrase as a distributor over a known set and the second as the share assigned to each member.
  • I5. Minimal pairs that differ in one feature give sharp contrasts: PP vs DP remnant, light vs heavy DP, simple vs embedded antecedent.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): After parsing a sluice whose remnants hang as orphan-like dependents, gparse output could be expanded by grafting a copy of the antecedent clause, with each remnant placed in the gap's slot.
  • I2 (frames): prag could fill the role slots of an elided frame by aligning remnants with indefinite arguments of the antecedent frame, using the preposition of a PP remnant to pick the role.
  • I3 (frames): When several antecedent clauses are candidates, prefer the most deeply embedded one that contains both correlates, and log this choice as the explanation.
  • I4 (answer): Questions like "which student spoke to which professor" could be answered as a list of entity pairs read from the world of the text, rather than a single referent.
  • I5 (learn): Such paired sentences could serve as negative controls in evaluation, checking that the ellipsis resolver rejects the starred variants.

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, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 499 worksNeuroscience · 165 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 164 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Myung-Kwan Park and Jung-Min Kang. 2007. Multiple Sluicing in English. Proceedings of the 21st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI http://hdl.handle.net/2065/29113

@inproceedings{park2007multiple,
  title = {{Multiple Sluicing in English}},
  author = {Myung-Kwan Park and Jung-Min Kang},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation},
  year = {2007},
  doi = {http://hdl.handle.net/2065/29113},
  url = {https://doi.org/http://hdl.handle.net/2065/29113}
}

References

25 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Barrie, Michael. 2005. Control and wh-infinitivals. New Horizons in the Grammar of Raising and Control. Harvard University. find
  2. Bolinger, Dwight. 1978. Asking more than One Thing at a Time. In Questions, ed. Henry Hiz, 107-150. Dordrecht: Reidel. ↗
  3. Comorovski, Ileana. 1996. Interrrogative Phrases and the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. find
  4. Dayal, Veneeta. 2002. Single-pair vs. Multiple-pair Answers: Wh in-situ and Scope. Linguistic Inquiry 333:512-20. find
  5. Fox, Danny and Howard Lasnik. 2003. Successive-cyclic movement and island repair: The difference between sluicing and VP-ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 34:143-154. ↗
  6. Higginbotham, James and Robert May. 1981 Questions, Quantifiers and Crossing. The Linguistic Review 1:41-79. ↗
  7. Hornstein, Norbert: 1995. Logical Form: From GB to Minimalism. Oxford: Blackwell. find
  8. Johnson, Kyle. 1996/2003. In search of the middle field. Unpublished manuscript. University of Massachusetts at Amherst. find
  9. Lasnik, Howard. 2007. Multiple Sluicing. An handout given in LING 819 Spring 2007. University of Maryland. find
  10. May, Robert. 1985. Logical Form: Its Structure and Derivation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. find
  11. Merchant, Jason. 2001. The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipsis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merchant, Jason. To appear. Variable island repair under ellipsis. In Topics in Ellipsis, ed. Kyle Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  12. Milsark, Gary. 1977. Toward an explanation of certain peculiarities of the existential. construction in English. Linguistic Analysis 3:1-30. find
  13. Nishigauchi, Taisuke. 1998. 'Multiple Sluicing' in Japanese and the functional nature of wh-phrases. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 7:121-152. ↗
  14. Pesetsky, David. 1987. Wh-in-situ: Movement and Unselective Binding. In The Representation of (In)definites, ed. by Eric Reuland and Alice ter Meulen, 98-129. Cambridge, Mass: MIT. Press. find
  15. ________________. 2000. Phrasal Movement and Its Kin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. find
  16. Reinhart, Tanya. 1997. Wh-in-situ in the Framework of the Minimalist Program. Natural Language Semantics 6:29-56. ↗
  17. Richards, Norvin. 1997. What Moves Where When in Which Language? PhD, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. find
  18. Richards, Norvin. 2001. Movement in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ↗
  19. _________________. 2006. A Distinctness condition on linearization. Ms. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. find
  20. Ross, John Robert. 1967. Constraints on Variables in Syntax. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Published as Infinite Syntax! Norwood, N.J.: Ablex (1986). find
  21. __________________. 1969. Guess who? In Papers from the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, ed. Robert I. Binnick, Alice Davison, Georgia M. Green, and Jerry L. Morgan, 252-286. Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. find
  22. Saito, Mamoru and Keiko Murasugi. 1992. Quasi-Adjuncts as Sentential Arguments. In Proceedings of the Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) 6. find
  23. Sloan, Kelly. 1991. Quantifier-wh interaction. In MIT working papers in linguistics 15,. 219-237. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. find
  24. Stjepanovic, Sandra. 2003. Multiple wh-fronting in Serbo-Croatian matrix questions and the matrix sluicing construction. In Multiple Wh-fronting, ed. Cedric Boeckx and Kleanthes K. Grohmann, 255-284. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ↗
  25. Takahashi, Daiko. 1994. Sluicing in Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics. 3:263-300. ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/park-2007-multiple-sluicing-english/