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On reconstruction effects in English <i>wh</i>-slifting: Theoretical and experimental considerations

Paper · 2019 · Christos Vlachos, Nikoletta Christou and Kleanthes K. Grohmann

Summary

The paper looks at English wh-slifting, as in "Who did Mary see, do you think?". Here a wh-question comes before a yes/no host question. The host verb normally takes declarative complements, yet the sentence is understood as if the wh-clause were that verb's complement. Earlier work (Haddican et al. 2014; Stepanov & Stateva 2016) used binding facts to argue that the two clauses are only paratactically linked, meaning the slift never sits below the host verb.

The authors re-examine Binding Principle C in two ways. They compare the "initial" order with the "split" order, and they vary the category of the wh-phrase. Some coreference patterns turn out to be impossible, and this only makes sense if the slift is interpreted below the host predicate. For Principle A, they ran a small acceptability-judgement pilot. Its results suggest that reflexives either support reconstruction or behave as exempt anaphors, so either way they give no evidence against it.

The overall verdict favours a hypotactic analysis. This leaves an open puzzle: how a proposition-selecting verb can take a question.

Key points

  • Two equivalent word orders are distinguished:
    • initial: "What did John buy, do you think?"
    • split: "What, do you think, did John buy?"
  • With the split order, coreference between he and John is ruled out. This is a Principle C violation, which shows that the slift reconstructs. It also shows that the host is not a parenthetical adjunct placed inside the slift.
  • In the initial order, an adjectival wh-phrase also blocks coreference ("How afraid of John are you, does he think?"). So the earlier claim that Principle C "bleeds" in slifting does not hold in general.
  • The authors set aside the backward variable-binding argument. Host subjects are strongly restricted to the second person, and quantifiers, indefinites, numerals and NPIs are infelicitous there for independent reasons.
  • In the Principle A pilot, the "intermediate" condition lowered acceptability both for slifting ("whole") and for ordinary wh-movement ("part"). In the ordinary-movement case, mean ratings fell from 6.29 (part–base) to 5.96 (part–intermediate), close to the GA value of 5.62. The control items came from Frank Keller.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Test structure by checking whether two surface orders with the same meaning get the same verdict under a single constraint; a mismatch shows which attachment analysis is wrong.
  • I2. Before using a failed binding or quantifier reading as structural evidence, rule out an independent pragmatic restriction that might cause it, as the authors do with the host's second-person subjects.
  • I3. Compare the target construction against a baseline construction (ordinary wh-movement) built with the same factorial manipulation, so that any effect common to both can be factored out.
  • I4. Treat some reflexives as exempt (logophoric) anaphors rather than as strictly bound ones, so that they do not count as evidence about syntactic position.
  • I5. Read slifted questions like "X, do you think?" as the embedded question of the host verb, since the meaning is a question about the hearer's belief.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (tree): Paraphrase-order pairs can be fed to the parsers to check whether the attachment of a fronted or interrupting clause stays consistent across orders.
  • I2 (learn): Evaluation could add negative controls that separate pragmatic infelicity from structural ungrammaticality before a parse is blamed.
  • I3 (learn): Self-repair rules could be validated by checking whether an error pattern also appears in a matched baseline construction, which would make it a general effect rather than a construction-specific one.
  • I4 (frames): Coreference for himself inside fronted or picture-NP phrases could allow a perspective-holder antecedent instead of demanding a c-commanding one.
  • I5 (answer): QA and speech-act handling could map these questions to "what does the addressee think about X", rather than treating them as two unrelated questions.

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

 Institutions

🎓University of PatrasPátrai · Greece2 works · 432 citations🎓University of CyprusNicosia · Cyprus2 works

 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 Christos Vlachos, Nikoletta Christou and Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2019. On reconstruction effects in English <i>wh</i>-slifting: Theoretical and experimental considerations. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.717

@article{vlachos2019reconstruction,
  title = {{On reconstruction effects in English <i>wh</i>-slifting: Theoretical and experimental considerations}},
  author = {Christos Vlachos, Nikoletta Christou and Kleanthes K. Grohmann},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.717},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.717}
}

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  26. How to cite this article: Vlachos, Christos, Nikoletta Christou and Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2019. On reconstruction effects in English wh-slifting: Theoretical and experimental considerations. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 138. 1–17. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.717 ↗
  27. Accepted: 15 September 2019 find
  28. Published: 23 December 2019 find
  29. Copyright: © 2019 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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