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This chapter offers a detailed empirical study of English swiping (e.g. What about?) and dialect Dutch spading (e.g. Wie dat? ‘who that’). The basic properties of both constructions are outlined and illustrated with examples. Both of them are shown to occur only with simple wh-phrases, to require stress on the stranded element, and to be restricted to sluicing contexts. Moreover, a swiped preposition is necessarily antecedentless, and spading stems from a cleft and induces a ‘surprise’-reading.

This chapter contains the analysis of English swiping and dialect Dutch spading and shows how the basic properties of these constructions follow from that analysis. Swiping is argued to involve preposition stranding in the lower specCP, while spading involves focus movement of the demonstrative to that position. The fact that both constructions only occur in sluicing is analyzed as a repair effect induced by ellipsis, while the fact that complex wh-phrases are excluded is the result of sluicing with complex wh-phrases deleting not IP but a low CP.

Swiping and spading can cooccur in one and the same example in Frisian. This chapter shows that the analysis of such sentences follows straightforwardly from the individual analyses outlined in the previous chapter. The chapter also takes issue with Merchant's (2002:310) claim that Frisian lacks swiping, arguing that the ill-formedness of Merchant's example follows from independent differences between English and Frisian regarding the possibility of putting stress on stranded prepositions.

This chapter introduces and discusses previous analyses of both spading and swiping, and argues that all of them suffer from shortcomings when confronted with the full set of data. The accounts discussed are Hoekstra (1993), a straw man analysis of spading as pseudosluicing, Kim (1997), Richards (2001), Merchant (2002) and Hartman (2007).

This chapter further extends the data set of this book in two ways. First of all, it briefly discusses the occurrence of spading in Eastern Norwegian and French. Secondly, it focuses on two other instances of stranding under sluicing: the stranding of the adverb dan ‘then’ in Dutch and the stranding of adverbial modifiers such as exactly. The former is shown to be substantially different from spading (despite superficial similarities), while the latter is shown to interact in an interesting way with both spading and swiping. In particular, the fact that a swiped preposition and a spaded demonstrative can intervene between a sluiced wh-phrase and an adverbial modifier indicates that the two do not form a constituent at Spell-Out and that the adverbial modifier is stranded inside the CP-domain as well. As such, swiping and spading can be used as a constituency diagnostic for sluiced phrases.

This chapter explores the interaction between the split-CP hypothesis and the syntax of sluicing. If there is more than one CP-projection, there is potential variation as to which part of the clausal structure is deleted by sluicing. When wh-movement targets a low CP-layer, IP is deleted, but when it targets a high CP-layer, it can be either IP or a low CP-projection that is deleted. The chapter argues for a significant difference between simple and complex wh-phrases, in which the former move from their theta positions through a lower CP-projection (CP₂) onto a higher one (CP₁), while the latter are directly base-generated in SpecCP₁. The chapter then examines the consequences of this proposal for the syntax of sluicing, showing how “swiping” and “spading” constructions in Dutch and Frisian indicate that in sluicing with complex wh-phrases, CP₂ is deleted, while in sluicing with simple wh-phrases, IP is deleted.

This chapter discusses the street songs sung by street traders in New Orleans and the relationship between the traders’ songs, transcribed by R. Emmet Kennedy and published in Mellows (1925), and blue-notes and barbershop “swipes.” This chapter also explores the relationship between spasm bands, ragtime, quartet singing and the emerging jazz bands of New Orleans.