‘Head of an XP’ fragments in Russian

Abstract

This paper examines a certain type of fragment answers in Russian, namely fragments that consist of a single head of a noun or a verb phrase. Invoking arguments from Vera Gribanova’s works on verb head movement and some novel data on noun head movement in Russian, I argue that these constructions are derived not by focus movement, as was previously proposed for fragment answers by Jason Merchant, but by the stranding of the phrase’s head. I show that the constructions in question present an argument in favor of the alternative theory of fragment derivation, proposed in Andrew Weir’s works, and help us reformulate the MaxElide constraint on fragment answers.