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This book is a multi-authored volume of eleven chapters dedicated to the analysis of sluicing in a range of languages from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Sluicing is the term applied to sentences in which the ellipsis of a sequence of words following an embedded wh question word appears to occur, and hearers must somehow recover the content of missing material, as in English: Someone saw her, but I don’t know who …. Elliptical constructions of this type are now known to occur widely in the world’s languages in some form or another, and create interesting problems for linguistic analysis, involving complex interactions between syntax, semantics, and morphology, as well as prosody. Because of this interdependence of different subcomponents of language, sluicing is a phenomenon with a strong interface characteristic, requiring integrative analyses and a formal modeling of permissible connections between syntax, morphology, semantics, and certain aspects of phonology. The present volume brings together a set of significant, new pieces of research by a team of leading experts who analyze sluicing constructions in English, Dutch, Frisian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Turkish, Malagasy, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and Bengali. The collection of chapters critically expands our current understanding of the ways in which languages allow for ellipsis of the sluicing type to occur, and shows how sluicing constructions reveal important information about the general architecture of grammar. In addition to the nine chapters dedicated to specific languages, the volume features an introduction chapter and Haj Ross’s original (1969) landmark chapter on sluicing.

This book investigates a number of elliptical constructions found in Dutch dialects within the framework of the Minimalist Program. It argues that both the PF-deletion and the pro-theory of ellipsis are needed to account for the full range of elliptical phenomena attested in natural language. In chapters 2–9 the book focuses on two instances of stranding under sluicing: stranding with prepositions in English (What about?) and stranding with demonstrative pronouns in southern Dutch dialects (Wie dat? ‘who that’). Both these phenomena are given a PF-deletion analysis, and are shown to be the result of the interaction between the split CP-hypothesis and the syntax of wh-movement. The second half of the book is concerned with Short Do Replies in southern Dutch dialects, a type of reply that expresses verum focus and that at first sight bears a close resemblance to English VP-ellipsis. It is shown that in this case the ellipsis site is best represented as a null, structureless proform that is licensed by the head of a high polarity projection. This pronominal is then argued to occur in two other dialectal constructions as well: contradictory replies of the type Da's nie ‘that.is not’ found in Brabant Dutch, and the occurrence of subject clitics and agreement endings on the polarity items yes and no in Southern Dutch dialects (e.g. Ja-n-s ‘yes-plural-they’).

Current Minimalist approaches to syntax claim that languages simply vary in the distribution of overt movement. Some languages have overt wh-movement, or EPP effects, or movement of the verb to T, for example, while others do not, and these are basic parameters of cross-linguistic difference, which cannot be made to follow from any other properties of the languages in question. This book offers a theory of the cross-linguistic distribution of overt movement. The central claim is that the construction of phonological representations begins during the syntactic derivation, and that overt movement is driven by universal phonological conditions. The conditions include one on the prosodic representations of syntactic relations like Agree and selection (Generalized Contiguity) and another on the relation between affixes and word-level metrical structure (Affix Support). The parameters differentiating languages are entirely a matter of prosody and morphology: languages differ in how their prosodic systems are arranged, in the number and nature of affixes appearing on the verb, and in the rules for word-internal stress placement. The resulting theory accounts for the distribution of wh-movement, head-movement of verbs and auxiliaries, and EPP-driven movement to the specifier of TP, in a number of languages. If the theory is correct, then a complete description of the phonology and morphology of a given language is also a complete description of its syntax.

This book develops a minimalist approach to cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation. The principal claim is that the essential insight of the principles-and-parameters approach to variation can be maintained—albeit in a somewhat different guise—in the context of the minimalist programme for linguistic theory. The central idea is to organize the parameters of Universal Grammar (UG) into hierarchies which define the ways in which properties of individually variant categories and features may act in concert. The hierarchies define macro-, meso-, and microparameters as a function of the position of parametric options in a given hierarchy. A further leading idea, which is consistent with the overall goal of the minimalist programme to reduce the content of UG, is that the parameter hierarchies are not directly determined by UG. They are emergent properties stemming from the interaction of the three factors in language design. Universal Grammar, the first factor, provides a template for the underspecification of the formal features in terms of which parameters are defined. The second and third factors determine the organization of these formal options into hierarchies: two third-factor effects (Feature Economy and Input Generalization) play a central role. Cross-linguistic variation in word order, null subjects, incorporation, verb-movement, case/alignment, wh-movement, and negation are all analysed in the light of this approach. This book represents a significant new contribution to the formal study of cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation on both the empirical and theoretical levels.

This book investigates the conditions imposed upon syntax by the need to create syntactic objects that can be interpreted by phonology — that is, objects which can be pronounced. Drawing extensively on linguistic data from a variety of languages, including Japanese, Basque, Tagalog, Spanish, Kinande (Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Chaha (Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia), it makes two new proposals about the relationship between syntax and phonology. The first, “Distinctness,” has to do with the process of imposing a linear order on the constituents of the tree. The book claims that syntactic nodes with many properties in common cannot be directly linearized and must be kept structurally distant from each other. It argues that a variety of syntactic phenomena can be explained by this generalization, including much of what has traditionally been covered by case theory. The book’s second proposal, “Beyond Strength and Weakness,” is an attempt to predict, for any given language, whether that language will exhibit overt or covert wh-movement. The book argues that we can predict whether or not a language can leave wh in situ by investigating more general properties of its prosody. This proposal offers an explanation for a cross-linguistic difference — that wh-phrases move overtly in some languages and covertly in others — that has hitherto been simply stipulated. In both these areas, it appears that syntax begins constructing a phonological representation earlier than previously thought; constraints on both word order and prosody begin at the beginning of the derivation.

This book represents the state of the art in the study of gradience in grammar: the degree to which utterances are acceptable or grammatical, and the relationship between acceptability and grammaticality. Gradience is at the centre of controversial issues in the theory of grammar and the understanding of language. The acceptability of words and sentences may be linked to the frequency of their use and measured on a scale. Among the questions considered in the book are: whether such measures are beyond the scope of a generative grammar or, in other words, whether the factors influencing acceptability are internal or external to grammar; whether observed gradience is a property of the mentally represented grammar or a reflection of variation among speakers; and what gradient phenomena reveal about the relationship between acceptability and grammaticality, and between competence and performance. The book is divided into four parts. Part I clarifies the nature of gradience from the perspectives of phonology, generative syntax, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Parts II and III examine issues in phonology and syntax. Part IV considers long wh-movement from different methodological perspectives. The data discussed comes from a wide range of languages and dialects, and includes tone and stress patterns, word order variation, and question formation.

This book proposes a novel, interface-based analysis of patterns of wh-movement in English in which constraints are stated over both syntactic and semantic representations. Firstly, a theory is presented of the internal structure of events as perceptual and cognitive units. The key question concerns the circumstances in which multiple smaller events, or subevents, can be perceived as jointly forming a single macroevent. Macroevent formation is possible if the subevents in question are perceived as related by one of two contingent relations, namely direct causation and enablement, where the latter is a relation holding among events that form part of an agent's plan. There is no single phrase-structural configuration which corresponds to enablement, so cognitive and semantic representations of event structure differ from syntactic representations of phrase structure in nontrivial ways. Certain patterns of extraction from adjuncts in English are amenable to simple descriptions stated over event-structural units and relations, but exhibit substantial differences from the patterns typically described by syntactic theories of locality. However, syntactic locality theories, as elaborated over the past 50 years, remain essential to an accurate description of the distribution of movement relations. The central challenge addressed by this work is therefore to allow syntactic and nonsyntactic factors to act jointly to constrain the syntactic operation of wh-movement without vitiating necessary assumptions about the modularity of the language faculty.