Abstract
This paper reports the results of three acceptability judgment experiments on Saudi Arabic elliptical questions (sluicing) with prepositional phrases. We show that in standard cases of merger type sluicing and contrastive sluicing there is no penalty for leaving out the preposition. Under an analysis of sluicing with syntactic identity between antecedent and ellipsis site, such examples require preposition stranding in the ellipsis site. We call this pattern OPUS, which the reader is invited to interpret as an abbreviation, depending on their theoretical predilections, as Ostensible P-stranding Under Sluicing or as Omission of Preposition Under Sluicing. Our findings show that Saudi Arabic violates Merchant’s (2001) second form identity generalization. Further experiments reveal that the status of the examples depends on the status of the most acceptable synonymous source within the ellipsis site; in particular, when neither a cleft structure nor a resumptive structure are grammatically available in the ellipsis site, the acceptability of OPUS decays. We interpret this as evidence that there is syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and that the wh-remnant in these elliptical questions can – and sometimes must – relate to a resumptive pronoun in the ellipsis site.
Highlights
Using data on Sluicing in Saudi Arabic, this paper is a contribution to the debate on the syntactic analysis of ellipsis
6 Conclusion To summarize, we conducted three acceptability judgment studies on OPUS in Saudi Arabic. They were driven by two main ideas: First, the ellipsis site contains silent syntactic structure
We showed that OPUS is acceptable in Saudi Arabic
Summary
Using data on Sluicing in Saudi Arabic, this paper is a contribution to the debate on the syntactic analysis of ellipsis. On the basis of three acceptability judgment experiments on Saudi Arabic elliptical questions with prepositional phrases we argue that there is syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and that the wh-remnant in these elliptical questions can – and sometimes must – relate to a resumptive pronoun in the ellipsis site. The argument rests on the observation that the acceptability of elliptical questions depends on the availability of a corresponding full question. The formation of elliptical questions in which only the wh-phrase is pronounced is referred to as sluicing (Ross 1969). But I don’t know what else [___________]
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