On English Swiping: a Direct Interpretation Approach

Abstract

It has been difficult to analyze swiping successfully, because of its idiosyncratic properties-the island sensitivity and the restriction on the prepositions available for swiping. The island sensitivity of swiping has been a challenging problem, because swiping, as well as sluicing, undergoes the deletion of TP at PF, which repairs illicit traces under the movement approach. Moreover, the property that not all prepositions can be swiped has been another challenge, because it is almost impossible to generalize what kinds of prepositions can be swiped. In this paper, swiping in English is analyzed under the Direct Interpretation approach using the construction-based HPSG framework. This paper argues that the swiped PP should be treated as a base-generated fragment, which is interpreted from the contextual information in DISC-REC. Moreover, in line with Kim and Kuno (2013), the island sensitivity of swiping was analyzed in terms of processing activation, where the implicit correlate should be activated in the FOC-ATT, because swiping with any antecedent clauses can be resolved so long as the implicit correlate is in the awareness of the hearer. In addition, by introducing a type hierarchy of the parts of speech, swiping-available prepositions were well-restricted.