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2      The syntax of sluicing

In this chapter I examine the structural conditions on sluicing and investigate its external
and internal syntax. The first issue, the external syntax, is by far the easier to tackle, and
the answer reached there is straightforward: the ‘sluice’ is a CP. The second, which
requires investigating the structure of ellipsis, that is, the syntax of silence, can only be
approached by more indirect means and is therefore much more difficult; the answer
defended here is that the ellipsis site contains syntactic structures of the kind familiar
from overt syntax.
       This chapter proceeds roughly in order of analytic difficulty. I begin with the
simplest task, identifying the category of the sluice by looking at what the external
distribution of sluiced wh-phrases is. The conclusion is unambiguous: sluices behave as
CPs. This leads to the hypothesis that the sluice consists of a CP in which the sentential
part, the IP, has gone missing. With this in mind, I turn to the more difficult question of
what mechanisms in the grammar license this silent IP. We will see that the conditions
are fairly parochial, being limited to certain feature combinations on the C sister to the
null IP. To capture these, I propose a mechanism for triggering deletion at PF based on
feature movement to C. I conclude by tackling a vexing analytic question raised by a
novel generalization established in section 2.2.2: nothing but the wh-phrase itself can
appear overtly in the C-system under sluicing. I suggest that this fact is related to other,
probably prosodic, limitations on the kinds of null elements that can immediately follow

2.1    External syntax: The sluice is an interrogative CP

I begin by investigating the external syntax of the sluiced material; that is, by addressing
the following question: how does the wh-phrase that appears in sluicing behave with

respect to the surrounding syntactic material? The arguments presented here, marshalled
from selectional facts, number, case, syntactic positioning, and prosody, will support the
opinio communis on this question, namely that what appears to be a simple wh-phrase
in isolation is in fact a CP. This is perhaps not a surprising conclusion, but it is one that
has been challenged and must be established before we can move on to the elliptical
puzzles it raises.
       Many of the arguments originate with the initial investigation of sluicing, Ross
1969. Since much of the literature takes his conclusions for granted, I will attempt not to
belabor the point here. But it has sometimes been specifically argued that sluicing need
not involve a CP, most notably by van Riemsdijk 1978, and to some extent by Ginzburg
1992. What is at issue is whether a sluice like (1) has the structure of a CP as in (2),
which I will defend here, or a more impoverished structure like the one in (3), defended
in van Riemsdijk 1978 in particular, where wh-fragments are generated on their own,
here as a complement to the verb know.

(1)    Anne invited someone, but I don’t know who.

(2)    Sluices as interrogative CPs:

       know CP

           who        C'

                Co         IP
               [+Q]         |
                  |         |
                 e         e

(3)    Sluices as ‘wh-fragments’:

       know      DP


       As we will see immediately, the sluiced wh-phrase behaves by all measures not as
a direct argument of an embedding predicate, but as a full interrogative CP.

2.1.1 Selection

As Ross 1969 pointed out, the generalization about which predicates allow sluicing in
their complements and which do not is quite simple to state:

(4)    All and only predicates that s-select questions and c-select CPs allow sluiced wh-

       Although know in (1) above allows both interrogative and non-interrogative
complement CPs, when we examine a verb like wonder which only takes interrogative
complements, as the contrast between (5a) and (5b) shows, we see that sluicing is
possible, as in (6).

(5)    a.      * I wonder {the time/the answer/the question}.
       b.      I wonder {what time it is/what the answer is/what Ben asked/who’s
(6)    a.      Ben wanted to ask something. I wonder what.
       b.      Abby said someone’s coming to dinner. We’re all wondering who.

       Indeed, when we examine predicates that are lexically ambiguous, like know or
remember, we find that the sluiced reading is often the only one that is available in a
given context. Although these can take DP objects as in (7) as well as CP complements
as in (8), when the context requires sluicing, what would otherwise be ambiguous
strings are disambiguated in favor of the embedded CP reading, as in (9).

(7)    a.      Jack knows Guard Mulligan.
       b.      Jill remembers the important announcement from yesterday.

(8)    a.     Jack knows which guard was present.
       b.     Jill remembers what I told you yesterday.

(9)    a.     He claimed one of the guards had been present. Who knows which?
       b.     I told you something important yesterday. Which of you remembers what?

       In the context given, (9a) for example has only the sluiced CP reading of (10a),
not that of a multiple DP question as in (10b). In other words, possible answers to (9a)
are those in (11a), not those in (11b).

(10)   a.     (9a) = Who knows which guard he claimed had been present?
       b.     (9a) ≠ Who knows which guard?

(11)   a.     Jack does. / Jack knows which.
       b.     # Jack knows Guard Mulligan, Bill knows Guard Keeley, etc.
              # Everyone knows the guard outside his cell.

       The difference between a sluicing interpretation of a wh-DP ‘object’ of one of
these predicates, and a regular, true argument interpretation of the same would be
completely mysterious under van Riemsdijk’s proposal, which collapses the two.
Instead, the relevant readings for (9a,b) indicate that we are dealing with a usual CP
complement to these verbs.

2.1.2 Number agreement

A second point made by Ross 1969 is that the agreement on the main verb which
appears with a sluiced wh-phrase is the typical agreement seen with CP subjects, and is
independent of the number marking on the wh-phrase itself. Just as the CP subject in
(12a) requires singular agreement on the verb (see McCloskey 1991c and references
therein), so does the sluiced plural wh-phrase in (12b).

(12)   a.     [CP Which problems are solvable] {is/*are} not obvious.
       b.     Some of these problems are solvable, but [which problems] {is/*are} not

2.1.3 Case

Ross credits George Williams for noting that the “question-word must ... agree in case
with some NP in a preceding clause” (p.253).           He illustrates this with the verbs
schmeicheln ‘flatter’, which assigns dative to its object, and loben ‘praise’, which
assigns accusative, as in (13) and (14):

(13)   Er will jemandem schmeicheln, aber sie wissen nicht, {wem / *wen}.
       he wants someonedat flatter         but they know not          whodat / whoacc
       ‘He wants to flatter someone, but they don’t know who.’
(14)   Er will jemanden loben, aber sie wissen nicht, {*wem/ wen}.
       he wants someoneacc praise but they know not             whodat / whoacc

       These examples illustrate as well that the case of the sluiced wh-phrase is
independent of the case that would be assigned to an object of the embedding
predicate, if this predicate can assign case. Wissen ‘know’, when transitive, assigns
accusative to its object, as in (15). Nevertheless, the sluiced wh-phrase in the accusative
is impossible if a verb like schmeichlen is understood, as in (13).

(15)   Sie wissen {*der Antwort / die Antwort } nicht.
       they know the answerdat / the answeracc not
       ‘They don’t know the answer.’

       The following example from Greek illustrates the same point with respect to the
nominative case required by subjects in (16a), which contrasts with the accusative case
normally assigned by the verb ksero ‘know’ as in (16b).

(16)   a.    Kapjos irthe, alla dhe ksero        {pjos   / *pjon}.
             someone came, but not know.1sg whonom / whom acc
             ‘Someone came, but I don’t know who.’
       b.    Dhe ksero     {*i apantisi / tin apantisi}.
             not know.1sg the answernom / the answeracc
             ‘I don’t know the answer.’

       Similar facts can be found with English prenominal genitives:

(17)   Somebody’s car is parked on the lawn, but we don’t know {whose/*who}.

With whose, however, it is not possible to be sure that we are dealing only with a case-
marked wh-phrase, since it is more likely that we have NP-ellipsis as well, as in [Whose
[NP car ]] is parked on the lawn? and [Ben’s [NP car ]] is parked on the lawn (see
Lobeck 1995). But the basic point is unaffected by such invisible pied-piping: the case
of the wh-phrase itself must correspond to that of its antecedent (somebody’s in (17)),
and cannot vary. We will return to these facts in chapter 3.
       But it is not the whole story to state only that the case of the wh-phrase must
“agree” with an antecedent — this is only the case when there is an antecedent. When
no overt antecedent for the wh-phrase is available, the case properties of the sluiced wh-
phrase are nevertheless not free, and in particular, are completely independent from any
case that the embedding predicate may assign to nominal objects of its own. The case
found on the sluiced wh-phrase will always correspond to the case its non-elliptical
counterpart would have shown in a full CP. I state this correlation in (18).

(18)   The wh-phrase shows only the case-marking from the elliptical IP-internal case
       position, not that of the embedding predicate.

       We can see this in the absence of an antecedent DP in an example like (19):

(19)   A car is parked on the lawn, but we don’t know {whose/*who}.

This is also visible in cases where a verb assigns a particular case to its object, but can
appear intransitively as well, as German helfen ‘help’, which assigns dative to its object.

(20)   Er meinte, er hätte       geholfen, aber wir wüßten      nicht, {wem / *wen}.
       he thought he had.SUBJ helped        but we knew.SUBJ not          who dat / whoacc
       ‘He claims he helped, but we wouldn’t be able to say who.’

       In all of these cases, the sluiced wh-phrase appears in the case assigned by the
elliptical predicate or in the case required by its function in the elliptical clause, and not
in the case that would be assigned by an embedding predicate.
       Another case-related argument against the bare-complement analysis comes from
adjectives which allow embedded questions under certain conditions, such as obvious,
clear, certain, etc. (essentially, these allow CP complements, with the licit illocutionary
force of the CP being determined by the matrix clausal characteristics: see Adger and
Quer 1997 and references therein). One of these is illustrated in (21):

(21)   Somebody had called, but it wasn’t clear who (had called).

       It is standardly assumed, however, that these adjectives cannot assign case,
accounting for the deviancy of (22a). In fact, even if case considerations could be
argued to not play a role, as in a there-insertion context like (22b), a DP complement to
clear is impossible.

(22)    a.    * It wasn’t clear his idea(s).
        b.    * There weren’t clear his ideas.

        The contrast between the sluiced version of (21) and these sentences militates
against the wh-fragment analysis. Even an adjective like worth, which can assign case
(see van Riemsdijk 1983) but does not license CP complements, cannot license sluicing:

(23)    a.    The watch is worth five dollars.
        b.    * The watch isn’t worth which bonds he cashed in.
        c.    * He cashed in some bonds, but I don’t think the watch is worth which.

        All of these cases indicate that the sluiced wh-phrase must receive case from a
case-assigner internal to the elliptical IP, and not from the embedding predicate.

2.1.4 Positional distribution

Another powerful argument that sluices are CPs comes from the positional distribution
of sluiced wh-phrases in a variety of languages. The basic generalization is that given in

(24)    The positions available to a sluiced wh-remnant are always the same as the
        positions available to full interrogative CPs, not the positions available to non-
        moved wh-phrases.

        Ross 1969 examines the facts of extraposition in English; his findings are given in
the next subsection. I give further arguments of a similar nature from German, Dutch,
Irish, and Hindi in subsection

                                               54      Extraposition in English

Ross 1969 notes that contrasts like those in (25) and (26) are mysterious if the sluiced
wh-phrase is not dominated by a CP. In (25) we see that the adjectival predicate clear
does not license ‘extraposition’ of a DP argument.

(25)   a.    The correct approach wasn’t clear.
       b.    *It wasn’t clear the correct approach.

Nevertheless, exactly this pattern seems to occur with a sluiced wh-DP, as in (26b).

(26)   a.    One of these approaches is correct, but [which of them] is not clear.
       b.    One of these approaches is correct, but it’s not clear [which of them].

Of course, under the CP view, this simply reflects the fact that interrogative CPs can
occur both as subjects and in extraposition contexts:

(27)   a.    [CP Which of these approaches is correct] is not clear.
       b.    It’s not clear [ CP which of these approaches is correct].

       Ross also gives examples with wh-PPs and adverbials phrases, which cannot
occur as arguments of clear in any case:

(28)   a.    * {With Bob/Quickly} wasn’t clear.
       b.    * It wasn’t clear {with Bob/quickly}.

But of course wh-phrases of these categories can appear in sluicing:

(29)   a.    We know that he was eating, but {with whom/how rapidly} isn’t clear.
       b.    We know that he was eating, but it isn’t clear {with whom/how rapidly}.

These patterns would be mysterious if the wh-phrase were somehow generated directly
as an argument of clear.       SODPVOCP languages

Another argument from positional distribution comes from languages in which nominal
arguments (including wh-phrases) occur on one side of the predicate, while sentential
arguments (including interrogative CPs) occur on the other. German, Dutch, Hindi, and
Irish are languages with this property: all are SOV with respect to nominal arguments
under some circumstances (German and Dutch only in embedded clauses; Irish only in
nonfinite clauses), but in general require CP arguments to appear to the right of the verb
(or topicalized, as we will see). The varying predictions of the two analyses under
consideration are clear: if sluiced wh-phrases are just base-generated wh-fragments in
the clause like other non-sentential arguments, they should appear to the left of the verb
(in the Mittelfeld). If the CP analysis is correct, sluiced wh-phrases should appear to the
right of the verb (in the Nachfeld). I concentrate here on German to begin with, though
the facts in Dutch are parallel. Hindi and Irish enter the discussion at the end.
        In German, wh-phrases can occur clause-internally in multiple wh-questions, as in

(30)    Wann hat Elke gestern {was / welches Auto} repariert?
        when has Elke yesterday what /which car         repaired
        ‘When did Elke fix {what/which car} yesterday?’

These wh-phrases are generally assumed not to be able to scramble like other DPs
(Fanselow 1990, Müller and Sternefeld 1993), giving rise to the contrasts in (31). In

(31a) we see that an object DP can scramble to precede the subject and an adverbial, yet
in (31b) the corresponding wh-phrase cannot.1

(31)   a.      Wann hat [das Auto]1 Elke gestern t1 repariert?
               when has the car          Elke yesterday repaired
               ‘When did Elke repair the car yesterday?’
       b.      * Wann hat [{was/welches Auto}]2 Elke gestern t2 repariert?
                  when has what / which car             Elke yesterday repaired
               (‘When did Elke fix {what/which car} yesterday?’)

       The data in (32) show that DPs to the right of the final verb (in the Nachfeld) are
degraded: wh-phrases, if anything, are worse here than definites like das Auto (cf. similar
restrictions on Heavy XP Shift in English).

(32)   a.      * Wann hat Elke gestern t1 repariert [das Auto] 1?
                 when has Elke yesterday repaired the car
       b.      * Wer hat gestern t2 repariert [welches Auto] 2?
                  who has yesterday repaired which car

       Full embedded interrogative CPs, on the other hand, cannot appear clause-
internally—they must either be extraposed as in (33a), or in SpecCP (the Vorfeld) as in
(33d) (see Büring 1995b, Müller 1995 for evidence that CPs are generated clause-
internally and reach their observed positions by movement):2

  This picture is somewhat simplified: wh-phrases seem to behave like indefinites with respect to
scrambling; see Beck 1996 for examples.
  Note that in this respect, embedded questions behave differently from embedded propositions,
whose positional possibilities are a function of the embedding predicate (see Webelhuth 1992, Büring
1995b). The fact that [+wh]CPs pattern with the propositional CP complements of verbs like sich
freuen (über) ‘be happy (about)’ (CP/PP-Vs, i.e. verbs that take CPs and PPs as complements) and
not verstehen ‘understand’ (CP/DP-Vs — verbs that take CP or DP complements) comes as
something of a surprise under Büring’s insightful analysis of extraposition. In general, CP/PP-Vs
require extraposition of the CP when no PP correlate is present, whereas CP/DP-Vs allow their CP
complements to remain in the Mittelfeld:
  (i) a.    Ich habe mich *(darüber) [daß er kommt] gefreut.
            I have REFL thereabout that he comes been.pleased

(33)        a.   Wir haben nicht gewußt, [welches Auto Elke repariert hat].
                 we have not known, which car Elke repaired has
                 ‘We didn’t know which car Elke repaired’
            b.   * Wir haben [welches Auto Elke repariert hat] nicht gewußt.
            c.   * Wir haben nicht [welches Auto Elke repariert hat] gewußt.
            d.   [Welches Auto Elke repariert hat] haben wir nicht gewußt.

The same holds for Hindi (thanks to R. Bhatt for discussion and data):

(34)        a.   Mujhe nahi$i$ pataa        [ki Gautam ne kis se          baat kii      thii].
                 I.DAT NEG knowledge that Gautam ERG who with talk do.PFV PAST
                 ‘I don’t know who Gautam talked to.’
            b.   * Mujhe nahi$i$ [ki Gautam ne kis se baat kii thii] pataa.
            c.   * Mujhe [ki Gautam ne kis se baat kii thii] nahi$i$ pataa.
            d.   [Gautam ne kis se baat kii           thii], mujhe (yeh) nahi$i$ pataa.3
                 Gautam ERG who with talk do.PFV PAST I.DAT it CP NEG knowledge

       b.      Ich habe [daß er kommt] verstanden.
               I have that he comes understood
But even though most of the predicates that embed [+wh]CPs also allow DP complements, and in fact
disallow PP correlates, extraposition is nevertheless obligatory:
   (ii) a.     Ich habe nicht verstanden, [warum er gegangen ist].
               I have not understood why he left               is
        b.     Ich habe seine Gründe nicht verstanden.
               I have his reasons not understood
Note that even predicates that allow PP correlates with propositional CPs do not allow them with
interrogative CPs:
   (iii) a. Wir haben (*davon) gewußt, [warum er gegangen ist].
               We have     thereof known why       he left        is
   cf. b. Wir haben (davon) gewußt, [daß er gegangen ist].
               We have thereof known that he left            is
These differences can presumably be reduced to the semantic type of the two CPs, which determines
whether an object expletive can be associated with the CP in question. A full development of this
approach must be left for further research.
    For independent reasons, the complementizer ki cannot appear in fronted finite clauses:
(i)        * [ki Gautam ne kis se baat kii            thii], mujhe (yeh) nahi$i$ pataa.
              that Gautam ERG who with talk do.PFV PAST I. DAT itCP NEG knowledge

       Crucially, sluiced wh-phrases in German and Hindi appear in the same positions as
embedded [+wh]CPs, and not clause-internally as wh-phrases in situ do:

       [Daß Elke ein Auto repariert hat] haben wir gewußt, aber...
       that Elke a   car      repaired has have we known but
       ‘We knew that Elke repaired a car, but...’
(35)   a.     wir haben nicht geahnt,      [welches].
              we have       not   suspected which
              ‘we had no idea about who.’
       b.     * wir haben [welches] nicht geahnt.
       c.     * wir haben nicht [welches] geahnt.
       d.     [welches] haben wir nicht geahnt.

       Gautam ne     kisi         se baat kii        thii,   lekin
       Gautam ERG someone with talk do.PFV PAST but
       ‘Gautam talked with someone, but...’
(36)   a.     mujhe nahi$i$ pataa         [kis se].
              I.DAT NEG knowledge who with
              ‘I don’t know with who.’
       b.     * mujhe [kis se] nahi$i$ pataa.
       c.     * mujhe nahi$i$ [kis se] pataa.
       d.     [kis se] (yeh) mujhe nahi$i$ pataa.

The data in (35) and (36) are entirely expected under the hypothesis that the sluiced
wh-phrase occupies the specifier of a full CP, but not if the wh-phrase is simply base-
generated in the matrix clause.
       Exactly the same kind of argument comes from Irish, which, while lacking the full
range of possibilites seen in German and Hindi, also exhibits a difference in the positions
occupied by CP vs. DP complements in some environments. (Thanks to J. McCloskey
for these data.) In nonfinite clauses, a DP object must precede the verb, as in (37).

(37)   Rinne sé socrú              le   duine den       dís,
       made he arrangement with person of.the two
       a.      ... ach níl     sé sásta [rud ar bith] a inseacht dúinn.
                  but he willing anything       tell[-FIN]
       b.      ... * ach níl sé sásta a inseacht dúinn [rud ar bith].
       ‘He made an arrangement with one of the two people, but he won’t tell us

Embedded CPs, however, must appear clause-finally:

(38)   a.      ... * ach níl    sé sásta [caidé a tá ar bun]        a inseacht dúinn.
                    but he willing what C is going-on tell[-FIN]
       b.      ... ach níl sé sásta a inseacht dúinn [caidé a tá ar bun].
               ‘... but he won’t tell us what’s going on.’

Again, sluiced wh-phrases appear where the CP appears, clause-finally, not clause-
internally as a DP argument would:

(39)   a.      ... * ach níl    sé sásta    [céacu ceann] a inseacht dúinn.
                    but he willing which of.them tell[-FIN]
       b.      ... ach níl sé sásta a inseacht dúinn [céacu ceann].
               ‘... but he won’t tell us which of them.’

       These data again support the identification of sluiced wh-phrases with CPs.4
Note also that these data show that whatever regulates the clause-peripherality of CPs

   Judith Aissen (p.c) informs me that it should be possible to make a similar argument on the basis
of the distribution of certain enclitic elements in Tzotzil, which attach to the right edge of an
intonational phrase. CPs, but not DPs, can extrapose, giving rise to the order ... enclitic CP but not
*... enclitic DP. In this regard, sluiced wh-phrases should behave just like full, extraposed clauses,
not like DPs, as in the following hypothetical data she provided:
         (i)    [Someone left...]
                a.       pero mu sna'       li Xun-e       buch'u (ibat).

in these languages, simply appealing to phonological weight as measured by number of
syllables or the like will not suffice. Instead, these data clearly indicate that, if such
positioning is driven by prosodic considerations as is often assumed, these prosodic rules
must be sensitive to higher prosodic structure, and not necessarily to the content. In
other words, if say, intonational phrases (IntP) must extrapose, but not perhaps smaller
prosodic phrases, then the syntactic category CP must itself directly project IntP by
virtue of its syntactic structure. This conclusion seems to me a welcome one, though I
will not pursue the algorithms necessary for deriving the prosodic exponence from
syntactic categories here.

2.1.5 German wh-stress shift

My last argument is based on the contrast in stress possibilities for wh-phrases in
German noticed by Höhle 1983 and discussed in Reis 1985. These authors point out
that certain multisyllabic wh-words can have variable stress in SpecCP of a matrix
clause, as in (40) and (41); stress can fall either on the operator part of the wh-word
(wV–) or the non-operator part (the incorporating preposition, essentially).        In an
embedded clause, however, these wh-words only permit stress on their non-operator
portion, as in (42) and (43). My concern here will not be to account for this contrast,
but simply to point out that sluiced wh-phrases pattern with wh-phrases in embedded

(40)   a.    Warúm ist Elke gekommen?
       b.    Wárum ist Elke gekommen?
             why      is Elke come
(41)   a.    Worán hat Elke gedacht?

                    but NEG he.knows the Juan-ENC who     left
                    ‘but Juan doesn’t know who (left).’
             b.     * pero mu sna'       li Xun buch'u-e.
                      but NEG he.knows the Juan who -ENC

        b.        Wóran hat Elke gedacht?
                  what-on has Elke thought

(42)    a.        Wir haben nicht gewußt, [warúm Elke gekommen ist].
        b.        * Wir haben nicht gewußt, [wárum Elke gekommen ist].
                    we have      not known        why    Elke come          is
(43)    a.        Wir wollten gerne wissen, [worán Elke gedacht hat].
        b.        * Wir wollten gerne wissen, [wóran        Elke gedacht hat].
                     we would gladly know          what-on Elke thought has

Note that this stress contrast is sensitive to depth of embedding, not simply sentence-
initial position, since a wh-phrase in the specifier of a topicalized CP still cannot take
initial stress:

(44)    a.        [Warúm Elke gekommen ist] haben wir nicht gewußt.
                   why       Elke come       is    have we not      known
        b.        *[Wárum Elke gekommen ist] haben wir nicht gewußt.
(45)    a.        [Worán Elke gedacht hat] wollten wir gerne wissen.
                   what-on Elke thought has would we gladly know
        b.        *[Wóran Elke gedacht hat] wollten wir gerne wissen.

Initial stress can also sometimes occur in wh-phrases in clause-internal positions (pace
Reis 1985); this stress pattern is found for example in echoic multiple wh-questions:

(46)    a.        Wer will     wohín     fahren?
        b.        Wer will     wóhin     fahren?
                  who wants

If these data are correct, they also indicate that the sluiced wh-phrase is internal to a CP. See Aissen
1992 for more discussion of these enclitics.

(47)    a.        Wer ist warúm gestorben?
        b.        Wer ist wárum gestorben?
                  who is why    died

Note that even in wh-expletive constructions5 (see McDaniel 1989, Müller 1995), wh-
words which presumably are in the initial SpecCP at LF but not at Spell-Out cannot take
initial stress:

(48)    a.        Was hast du nochmal gesagt, worán ich dich erinnern sollte?
        b.        * Was hast du nochmal gesagt, wóran           ich dich erinnern sollte?
                   what have you again       said     what-on I     you remind should

        Crucially, the wh-phrase in a sluice only has the final stress found in embedded
clauses ((49) and (51)), even when topicalized ((50) and (52)):

(49)    a.        Elke ist gekommen, aber wir haben nicht gewußt [warúm].
   Sluicing over a wh-expletive itself is impossible, even when the corresponding question would be
well-formed, as in (ii):
        (i)     * Du hast mir gesagt, ich sollte dich an jemanden erinnern, aber ich weiß nicht mehr,
                  you have me told I should you on someone remind but I know not longer
                [wasx [du mir gesagt hast, an wenx ich dich erinnern sollte]]
                 what you me told have on who I you remind should
                (‘You told me to remind you about someone, but I can’t remember who.’)
        (ii)    Wasx hast du mir gesagt, an wenx ich dich erinnern sollte?
                what have you me told on who I you remind should
                ‘Who did you tell me to remind you about?’
        This is the result of the fact that the remnant wh-phrase in the sluice would have to be
focussed, but wh-expletives, and expletives in general, cannot be; cf.:
        (iii)   a.       * IT was raining.
                b.       * THERE are prisoners in the yard.
                c.       * IT is obvious that I’m right.
                d.       * WAS hast du gesagt, an wen ich dich erinnern sollte?
        This clash of requirements presumably is also at work in ruling out bare wh-R-pronouns
under sluicing, as in the Dutch example in (iva):
        (iv)    a.       * Hij rekent ergens    op, maar ik weet niet, waar.
                           he counts something on but I know not what
                         (‘He is counting on something, but I don’t know what.’)
        cf.     b.       * Ik weet niet, WAAR hij op rekent. [only constrastive on WAAR]
                           Ik weet niet, waar hij OP rekent.
                           I know not what he on counts

       b.     * Elke ist gekommen, aber wir haben nicht gewußt [wárum].
                Elke is come           but we have     not known why
(50)          Elke ist gekommen, aber
       a.     [warúm] haben wir nicht gewußt.
       b.     * [wárum] haben wir nicht gewußt.
                  why     have    we not    known

(51)   a.     Elke hat an etwas gedacht, und wir würden gerne wissen [worán].
       b.     * Elke hat an etwas          gedacht, und wir würden gerne wissen [wóran].
                Elke has on something thought and we would gladly know what-on
(52)          Elke hat an etwas gedacht, und
       a.     [worán] würden wir gerne wissen.
       b.     * [wóran] würden wir gerne wissen.
                 what-on would we gladly know

       Again, this is entirely expected if the wh-phrase in a sluice is in the specifier of an
embedded CP, but quite mysterious otherwise.

2.1.6 Summary

We have seen five reasons to believe that sluiced wh-phrases are the audible part of a
CP whose sentential domain is elliptical, and that these sluiced XPs are not simply
fragment XPs generated by the grammar and inserted in place of CPs as proposed by
van Riemsdijk 1978. For the remainder of this dissertation, then, we can take it that
sluices have at least the structure in (53). This structure supposes that the wh-XP occurs
in SpecCP, which I take to be the null hypothesis based on the overt manifestations of
interrogative structures in the languages examined above. The question whether such
movement must be overt will briefly re-engage our attention later when we examine data

       See Gussenhoven 1983: ch. 5 and Hoekstra 1995 for discussion of accent placement in these

from wh-in-situ languages, but in general I will proceed on the assumption that the wh-
remnant is immediately dominated by CP.

(53)        CP

       XP[+wh]     ...

       Having established what the external syntax of the sluice is, let us turn now to
the more difficult question of its internal syntax.

2.2    Internal syntax: The hidden structure of the sluice

Discerning the internal syntax of the sluice means investigating the structure of silence:
attempting to determine what structure must be present in order to generate the
perceived interpetation of elliptical phrases. I take it for granted that the primary
desideratum of any theory of the interpretation of ellipsis is providing the appropriate
material for interpretation.   Within the theory assumed here, this means providing
appropriate structures to LF, though of course these will be supplemented by
interpretational mechanisms that do not rely on structural conditions. I will assume that
the level of LF should be transparent to the semantics in the sense of Heim and Kratzer
1998 and others, and that all semantically relevant material must be represented there.
Since LFs are structural, consisting of phrase markers, this view entails that ellipsis
resolution is of a different nature than general processes of inferential deduction
(assuming such processes do not operate on syntactic structure sensu stricto).
       For sluicing in particular, this means that the missing IP must be supplied by the
syntax, either by being present throughout the syntactic derivation with the ellipsis
being deletion at PF or by copying of phrase markers at LF. This point cannot be
emphasized enough — it is fair to say that one of the major results of the data presented
in this dissertation is to show that ellipsis is structural, that is, that an ellipsis site
contains syntactic structures of the kind familiar from overt syntax.

       This is not a trivial basis to start from, of course, and some researchers have sought
to do without it (see for instance Ginzburg 1992, in preparation). But doing without it
entails complicating the syntax-semantics interface in ways that, while clearly needed for
the interpretation of certain elements which take parts of their meaning from the context
(indexicals, deictics, gradable adjectives, etc.), are not so clearly needed for the
interpretation of ellipsis. Sluicing in particular, in contrast to the more often studied VP-
ellipsis, clearly shows syntactic dependencies which require that certain structures
which are not audible nevertheless be present in the syntax. The alternative would be
to burden the semantics with information about idiosyncratic case assignment and
whether or not a language allows preposition stranding, as we will see in detail in the
next chapter. I take it that it is desirable to construct a theory in which such information
is not available to the semantics sensu stricto, and is available in the derivation only as
late as LF, a syntactic structural level.
       This brings us back to the point made above—if ellipsis is indeed structurally
represented, we have two choices: either the structure is provided by the syntax as
usual, and the grammar does something unusual to it (that is, it issues instructions not to
pronounce any of it), or the structure that provides the input to phonology itself
contains no phonologically relevant material in the ellipsis site, requiring that structure
be provided after Spell-Out on the LF-side of the derivation. As has been noted in the
literature (see Lobeck 1995 for discussion and references), the former view requires a
kind of communication between the distinct levels of PF and LF which might seem
problematic. But this kind of ‘communication’ is necessary in any case, to account for
the distribution of deaccenting phenomena, where appeal to copying procedures is
irrelevant in principle6. In much of what follows, whether one adopts a copy or deletion
approach will not be crucial, the evidence being compatible with either approach. In
later sections, however, anticipating the data and conclusions of chapter 3, I will phrase
the analytical options in terms that implement the generalizations using deletion at PF.

  This ‘communication’ is also required to account for semantic focus and pitch correlations, and
indeed for the fact of sound-meaning correspondence in general.

2.2.1 Licensing conditions on IP ellipsis

The elliptical IP in sluicing is licensed only in certain environments, as has long been
noted in the literature, going back to Ross 1969. It is not generally the case that IPs can
be elided, as the examples in (54) show for IP complements to the complementizer that.7

(54)   a.      She was there, but Ben didn’t know [CP that [ IP she was there]].
       b.      * She was there, but Ben didn’t know [CP that [ IP e ]].

       The embedded IP in example (54a) for instance is preferably pronounced with the
‘low-flat’ intonation characteristic of repeated material in English. This deaccented
intonation is often taken to be in essentially free variation with complete phonological
reduction, that is, deletion. But while deaccenting is possible here, ellipsis is not. This
means that we must postulate some additional, grammatical requirement on this kind of
ellipsis which goes beyond simply allowing the phonology to interpret given structures
either as ‘deaccented’ or ‘unpronounced’.
       Exactly the same holds for that in all other environments as well:

(55)   a.      It was painted, but it wasn’t obvious [CP that [ IP it was painted]].
       b.      * It was painted, but it wasn’t obvious [CP that [ IP e ]].
(56)   a.      It was painted, but [CP that [ IP it was painted]] wasn’t obvious to the casual
       b.      * It was painted, but [CP that [ IP e ]] wasn’t obvious to the casual observer.
(57)   a.      She had arrived, but [ CP that [ IP she had arrived]], they didn’t tell us.
       b.       * She had arrived, but [ CP that [ IP e ]], they didn’t tell us.

   This holds of course for the complementizer that in (54b), not for the demonstrative that. I n
languages such as Greek where there is no homophony between these elements, the relevant examples
are unambiguously ungrammatical (oti is the complementizer ‘that’, while afto is the demonstrative):
        (i)    a.      Itan ekei, alla o Petros dhen iksere [CP oti [IP itan ekei]].
                       was there but the Petros not knew       that was there
                       ‘She was there, but Peter didn’t know she was there.’

As noted by Ross 1969, the complementizers whether and if also fail to license null IP

(58)   * The Pentagon leaked that it would close the Presidio, but no-one knew for sure
       [CP {whether / if} [IP e ]].

The same holds for the complementizer for, as pointed out by Lobeck (1995:46):

(59)   * Sue asked Bill to leave, but [ CP for [IP e ]] would be unexpected.

       Lobeck, adapting the CP projection of Chomsky 1986, gives the structure in (60)
for sluicing:

(60)            CP

       XP[+wh]            C'
                 C     [+Q]    IP

       Lobeck 1995 further discusses a number of cases which indicate that the null IP
in sluicing is subject to quite strict licensing and identification requirements. To begin,
null IPs do not occur when lexically governed, as in (61) and (62) (Lobeck 1995: 56):

(61)   a.        * Even though Mary doesn’t believe [IP e ], Sue expects Hortense to be
       b.        * John appears to be smart, and Mary also seems [IP e ].
       c.        * Mary doesn’t expect Bill to win, but she wants [IP e ].
(62)   a.        * John talked to Bill, but before [IP e ], Mary called.
       b.        * Mary ate peanuts during the game, and while [IP e ], the home team made
                 four runs.

                 b.           * Itan ekei, alla o Petros dhen iksere [CP oti [IP e ]].

Lobeck proposes that the null IP must be properly head-governed by an agreeing head,
here C o, which must be specified [+wh]. This correctly rules out cases of ‘partial’
sluicing, as in (63) (her (54), p.56), since the embedded Co is not [+wh].

(63)   I know someone likes Mary, but
       a.         * who do you think [CP t [Co [IP e ]]?
       b.         who do you think [CP t' [Co [IP t likes her]]?

However, even if the embedded complementizer is [+wh], such partial sluicing is still

(64)   a.         * They wondered if Marsha would invite someone, but I don’t remember
                  who they wondered whether [IP e ].
cf.    b.         ? Who did they wonder whether Marsha would invite?

Lobeck’s system rules this out as well, by stipulating that the licensing Co must be
coindexed with a lexical wh-phrase in SpecCP. However, even if this condition is met,
embedded sluicing may still be impossible, as in Williams’s (1986) example:8

(65)   * John knows how to do something, but I don’t know what he knows how
       [IP e ].
       (i.e., ... I don’t know what he knows how to do.)

       What seems to be causing the degradation of the ‘partial’ ellipsis examples in
(64)-(65) is a prohibition on eliding less than possible: partial ellipsis as in (64)-(65)

   I will not go into Williams’ account of the ungrammaticality of this example, since it relies on the
incorrect assumption that distinct operators may not bind into an ellipsis site, from Williams 1977 and
Sag 1976. Such an restriction on alphabetic variance incorrectly rules out examples like (i):
         (i)     I know what I like and what I don’t.

requires that redundant material be destressed adjacent to an ellipsis site. It is this
constraint9 that seems to play a role in the unexpected oddness of examples like (66b):

(66)   a.      Ben knows who she invited, but Charlie doesn’t.
       b.      ?? Ben knows who she invited, but Charlie doesn’t know who.
       c.      Ben knows who she invited, but Charlie doesn’t know who she invited.
cf.    d.      ?? Ben knows who she invited, but Charlie doesn’t know who she did.

       To return to the conditions on the C-system in sluicing: simple agreement with a
[+wh] operator in SpecCP is not enough to license the null IP, since sluicing is not
possible in relative clauses (example (c) is Lobeck’s (57b), p.57).

(67)   a.      * Somebody stole the car, but they couldn’t find the person who.
       b.      * The judge gave 5 years each to the adults who participated in the riot,
               but she hasn’t yet sentenced the minors who.
       c.      * Although the place where is unclear, the time when the meeting is to be
               held is posted on the door.

Lobeck assumes that the complementizer that occurs in relative clauses with overt
relative operators is [-wh], citing Rizzi 1990. This allows her to maintain that the

  This restriction on ‘partial’ deletions, or mixing ellipsis with wh-operators and deaccenting, also
extends to the problematic example discussed by Tancredi 1992:123:
        (i)      A: I wish I knew who brought what to the party.
                 B: I wish I did too. I have no IDEA a.         * who did.
                                                         b.     who brought what (to the party).
        Something like Tancredi’s stipulation limiting this to interactions involving wh-operators
seems necessary, given the well-formedness of the following examples with VP-ellipsis:
        (ii)     a.      Abby knew that he had quit, but Beth didn’t know that he had.
                 b.      Abby asked if he had quit, but Beth didn’t ask if he had.
These examples contrast for some speakers with examples where the ellipsis site contains, under
standard assumptions, the origin site of the fronted adjunct when.
        (iii)    a.      ?? Abby knew when he had quit, but Beth didn’t know when he had.
                 b.      ?? Abby asked when he had quit, but Beth didn’t ask when he had.
        These contrasts raise interesting questions about the interaction between deaccenting, ellipsis,
and wh-extraction which I will not go into here. The interested reader should see the discussion in
Lobeck 1995: §6.3 and Johnson 1997, as well as Winkler 1997. I will set them aside here, and return
to the core data any theory of IP-ellipsis should aim to cover.

‘strong’ feature (value) [+wh] is sufficient to license and identify the null IP. In fact,
however, Rizzi’s 1990 system makes a slightly different division than the one Lobeck
claims, though one that can be modified to her purposes easily enough. For Rizzi, the
complementizer in relative clauses can be either [+wh], co-occuring with overt wh-
relative operators, or [-wh], co-occuring with the null operator. The former is always null
in English, while the latter varies, subject to conditions not of interest here. Both Cos,
however, are [+pred], while the [+wh] Co that occurs in interrogatives is [-pred].
Adapting this to Lobeck’s system, we must claim that only the null [+wh, -pred] Co of
interrogatives will license the null IP.
       Similar reasoning extends to the cleft examples in (68):10

(68)   a.      * We thought it was Abby who stole the car, but it was Ben who.
       b.      * Somebody stole the car, but no-one knew that it was Ben who.

       Lobeck’s earlier licensing and identification requirements were meant to have
much in common with the Empty Category Principle, and as such relied crucially on the
notion of head government. In a more recent approach to these requirements on ellipsis,
consonant with the Minimalist Program’s program to eliminate government as a
theoretical device, Lobeck 1999 has proposed that the null category undergoes
movement into the specifier of the licensing head. Her discussion is confined to the case
of VP-ellipsis: in this approach, the null VP (a maximal and minimal null element similar to
pro) moves into SpecTP to check a strong agreement feature, since feature checking
requires a spec-head configuration, by hypothesis. She assumes that SpecTP is free for
this VP, the subject being in SpecAgrSP. Whatever the merits of this approach, it is clear

    Interestingly, pseudoclefts seem to allow sluicing to some extent:
        (i)      a.      ? Ben stole something — [what] was a car.
                 b.      ? He left, and when was yesterday.
I use the order [wh-phrase]-[pivot] to avoid the distracting presence of such collocations as the
        (ii)     a.      What did Ben steal? A car is what! *What is a car.
                 b.      What’s he doing? Dancing a jig is what! *What is dancing a jig.
The availability of sluicing in pseudoclefts is expected if these are ‘self-answering’ questions, as
proposed in Higgins 1973 and den Dikken et al. 1998, and less free-relative-like; free-relatives, like
regular relative clauses, do not license sluicing:

that extending it to sluicing is impossible: in sluicing, a wh-phrase occupies SpecCP,
blocking movement of the null IP.
       It seems instead that, if we are to capture the intuitions behind the government
approach to licensing in a Minimalist framework dispensing with government per se, we
should locate the necessarily local relation between the licensing head C and the elided
category IP not in a spec-head relation, but in a head-head relation11. We can employ
the same conditions on licensing identified by Lobeck, recasting them as featural
matching requirements in a head-head relation, the other structural relation available for
feature checking. What is needed is a feature on I that can only be checked by a [+wh,
–pred] C head, and which triggers deletion of the IP at PF. Call this feature E. E moves
from I to C, along the lines discussed above, being checked in C12.                  E issues an
instruction to the PF system to skip its complement for purposes of parsing and
production. Here I am assuming a strictly left-to-right algorithm for PF: at each syntactic
node, the features on that node trigger operations in the phonological component,
whether these be lexical insertion or construction of prosodic categories, etc.                 For
example, a CP node must be mapped onto some higher level prosodic category (perhaps
an intonational phrase) regardless of how many syllables occur inside CP, as discussed in
§2.1.4. While some features on nodes may indicate that they are to be prosodically
incorporated into their sisters, the E feature will indicate the opposite: its sister is not to
be prosodically incorporated into the PF structure at all.
       Modulo the resolution of independent questions about how one implements
semantic composition for complex heads which I will ignore, we can also give the
semantics for E: essentially, E is the feature that imposes the Focus condition defined in
chapter 1. The simplest way of implementing this, assuming that E will combine with IP
(again, how the independent contribution of C is implemented is a separate question, not
unique to the current issue), is to assimilate the failure of deletions that do not respect
the Focus condition to a kind of presupposition failure. Under this approach, we would

        (iii)   * He’s up to something again, and I don’t like [what]!
   Or feature-feature relation, to the extent these differ.
   Equivalently, the feature could start on C, not being moved there from I at all. In this case, we
would state the checking requirement of E as a feature compatibility requirement. I see no reason to
choose between these alternatives here.

have a partial identity function for the meaning of E, following the implementation of
Heim and Kratzer 1998:244:

(69)   [[ E ]] = λp : p is e-GIVEN . p

       By giving a semantics for E, the licensing (the local featural requirements of E)
and identification (the semantic condition E imposes on its complement) requirements on
ellipsis can for the first time be linked.
       This view of the mechanism of ellipsis retains the advantage of the government
approach in requiring a very local relation to hold between the head which checks the E
feature (‘licensing’ the ellipsis, in traditional terms) and the category affected by E, while
at the same time integrating this with a more restrictive view of the possible relations
employed in the syntax. Note that this particular implementation leaves open the exact
nature and number of the checking features, and the requirements of E to be checked,
allowing for cross-linguistic variation in this domain if necessary. This seems to me to be
a promising line of attack, opening the way to a reformulation of Lobeck’s notion of
‘strong agreement’.

       At this point, however, we still have little in the way of concrete empirical
evidence which of the general approaches examined here is to be preferred: the data
thus far are compatible either with the view that treats ellipsis sites as empty categories
in the syntax, or with the view that takes ellipsis as the result of deletion at PF.

2.2.2 The COMP system in sluicing

This section examines that area of structure traditionally known as COMP: material
dominated by CP but external to IP, in a structure like (70):

(70)        [CP XP[+wh] C       [IP ... ]]


       Languages differ widely on what sort of material can appear in the COMP field
and under what circumstances. It is not my aim here to give a review of the literature
that deals with how languages differ in this respect and how the various patterns are to
be accounted for. My aim here will be limited to examining the behavior of the COMP
field under sluicing, and in extracting the significance of the data presented for the
proper analysis of the syntax of sluicing. The data that I will present can be described in
a very simple and surprising generalization, given in (71):

(71)   Sluicing-COMP generalization
       In sluicing, no non-operator material may appear in COMP.

       Here, let us understand ‘operator’ as ‘syntactic wh-XP’, as in (70) above. By
‘material’ in (71) I mean simply any pronounced element. This is meant to include
complementizers, verbs, clitics, agreement morphemes, and the like. The claim is that only
segments directly associated with the syntactic operator—the wh-XP—will be found
overtly in sluiced interrogatives.
       The generalization as stated subsumes two separate subcases, which I will
examine independently below. The first subcase concerns elements which are usually
analyzed as originating within IP and moving into COMP or cliticizing parasitically onto
elements base-generated there. These include Io-to-C o verb movement in the Germanic
languages, complementizer agreement, Wackernagel clitics in South Slavic and other
Balkan languages, and a variety of ‘second position’ phenomena in general.             The
second subcase concerns elements that are usually assumed to be base-generated in the
COMP system, namely complementizers themselves (as well as wh-expletives in some
languages, see footnote 5, and wh-operators that bind resumptive pronouns, see chapter
4 §4.3).

       The conclusion reached is that although the facts from this domain (to the extent
they have been discussed at all) have been taken to support a the null-category
approach to ellipsis over the deletion approach, upon closer inspection these facts are
fully compatible with the deletion approach, and may provide the basis for interesting
conclusions on the nature of feature-driven movement as well. Finally, the restrictions
on elements in sluicing seem best thought of as operative at the PF interface, similar in
some respects to the COMP-trace effect.       Non-operator foreign elements in COMP

I begin with an examination of the facts from English, Dutch, German, and Danish main-
clause sluicing (to the best of my knowledge, these facts are identical in the other
Scandanavian languages as well). As is well known (see Vikner 1995 for discussion and
references), all of these languages exhibit verb-second (V2) in unembedded
interrogatives, as shown in (72). Though they differ in whether they require V2 in non-
interrogative main clauses, such structures will not be of interest here, since sluicing is
limited to interrogative structures only.

(72)   a.     Who has     Max invited?                                     [English]
       b.     Wen hat     Max eingeladen?                                  [German]
       c.     Wie heeft Max uitgenodigd?                                    [Dutch]
       d.     Hvem har Max inviteret?                                      [Danish]

       This is standardly analyzed as Io-to-C o movement, illustrated in (73) for English (I
assume for simplicity that this movement is substitution and not adjunction, the ordering
of inflectional elements within a ‘complex head’ being determined by principles of
morphology and not directionality of adjunction):

(73)           CP

        who2         C'
               C            IP
            [Io has] Max tI [VP invited t2 ]

       Given the structure in (73), we might expect that main-clause sluices in these
languages would consist of the wh-XP followed by some moved verb, especially if the
IP ellipsis in sluicing is simply phonological deletion of the material remaining in the IP at
PF. This expectation is not borne out:

(74)   a.   A: Max has invited someone.                 B: Really? Who (*has)?      [English]
       b.   A: Max hat jemand eingeladen.               B: Echt?   Wen (*hat)?     [German]
       c.   A: Max heeft iemand uitgenodigd.            B: Ja?     Wie (*heeft)?     [Dutch]
       d.   A: Max har inviteret en eller anden.        B: Ja?     Hvem (*har)?     [Danish]

       One might wonder whether such structures really consist of sluices at all—after
all, fragment questions clearly exist, in echo functions, and indeed need not even display
wh-forms, though this is certainly also possible.

(75)   A: Superman tricked Mr. Mxlplckx.
       a.      B: Who?
       b.      B: Mr. who?          c.         B: Superman tricked Mr. who?

       But it is easy to see that such bare-echo wh-XPs differ considerably from the
matrix sluices in (74). First, the intonational contour on the wh-phrase in (75a) is the
same intonation that the questions in (75b,c) bear, namely a rise (L*H; though see
Gunlogson in prep. for a much fuller picture). The sluiced wh-phrase in (74a), on the
other hand, bears the contour assigned to full questions in this context: a fall, as in Who
did he trick?. As signalled by the differing pitch contours, the status of bare echo wh-

XPs like (75a) and that of matrix informational question (sluiced) wh-XPs as in (74) are
completely different.
        Note also that the illocutionary modifier really that precedes the matrix sluice in
the examples in (74) in not possible before an echo question:

(76)    A: Superman tricked Mr. Mxlplckx.
        B: # Really? Who?

This derives from the fact that really here indicates that B has accepted the content of
A’s utterance into the common ground (though perhaps signalling some surprise). This
uptake is obviously not possible if B has not understood the content of A’s utterance to
begin with, as indicated by the use of the rise contour.
        A second, syntactic piece of evidence for keeping main-clause sluicing and
fragment wh-questions separate comes from the limited use of R-pronoun inversion in
English sluices.13 We can observe that some wh-operators can invert with a governing
preposition in English sluicing, as illustrated in (77):

    Space prevents a full discussion of this phenomenon here, but I note that it is also found in the
Scandinavian languages (thanks to P. Svenonius for the Norwegian and L. Mikkelsen for the Danish):
        (i)      Per har gått på kino,          men jeg vet      ikke hvem med.          [Norwegian]
                 Per er     gået i biografen, men jeg ved ikke hvem med.                 [Danish]
                 Per has/is gone to cinema       but I know not who with
                 ‘Per went to the movies but I don’t know who with.’
        In English at least, this inversion is limited to the ‘minimal’ wh-operators who, what, where,
and when. Despite this, it not (just) prosodically conditioned, since which and whose are impossible
while —as pointed out to me by J. Itô (p.c.)— compounds with the hell are possible (though not
generally in sluicing; see chapter 4 §4.2.2 (3)):
        (i)      a.      He was talking to one of those guys, but I don’t know which (*to).
                 b.      He was talking to somebody’s mom, but I don’t know whose (*to).
                 c.      He was talking, but God knows who the hell to.
        Previous investigators have linked the available of this inversion to the R-pronoun inversion in
continental West Germanic (as in German wovon, Dutch waarvan ‘where-from’; see van Riemsdijk
1978 and Chung et al. 1995). Still, numerous differences distinguish the two phenonema. In
English, it seems the most adequate account is to take the wh-words that participate in these to be
heads that have raised to P (‘minimal maximal’ Xs, like clitics, in Chomsky’s 1995 terms). Head-to-
head movement picks out exactly this class (ruling out which, assuming that excorporation is
banned). See chapter 4 §4.2.2 (7) for additional data.
        If this suggestion is correct, a modifier like the hell must either be head-adjoined or a lexical
affix. This seems correct — this modifier occurs on monomorphemic words/heads as in
{who/where/why} the hell / how the hell long / what the hell book (Pesetsky 1987:111 (40a)), but not

(77)     Lois was talking (to someone), but I don’t know [who to].

         This is of course not possible in non-sluiced interrogatives:

(78)     a.     * I don’t know [who to] Lois was talking.
         b.     * [Who to] was Lois talking?

         This inversion can thus be taken as sluicing-specific, for reasons that will not
concern us yet. Crucially, such inversion appears also in matrix sluicing:

(79)     A: Lois was talking (to someone). B: Really? Who to?

         But this inversion is not possible in echo-wh-fragments:

(80)     A: Lois was talking to Mr. Mxlplckx.
         a.     B: To who?
         b.     B: *Who to?

With inversion, the presence of a moved auxiliary in C is impossible, parallel to (74a)

on phrases: * what book the hell / * how long the hell. Many questions remain, of course (for
example, the difference between the hell and similar modifiers like on earth which also occur in
inverted sluices like (ic) remains to be elucidated).
        The remaining question, which has never been addressed, is why this is possible only under
sluicing in English (R-pronoun inversion in German and Dutch being much more general). Clearly
this possibility must be linked to the absence of prosodic material in IP (and C, as we will see below),
perhaps indicating that this head movement occurs at PF; at this point, I can only suspect that this fact
should inform our theory of recursive stress assignment and prosodic constituency.

(81)   A: Lois was talking (to someone). B: Really? Who to (*was)?

       This brief excursus has been simply to establish the point that sluicing occurs in
matrix clauses as well, pace Ross 1969 and Klein 1977, but in agreement with Bechhofer
1976a,b, 1977 (see the latter for further evidence).     This leaves the pattern in (74)
mysterious for the moment.
       A similar puzzle comes from the South Slavic languages which have
‘Wackernagel’ clitics, such as Slovene, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, and Macedonian. In
these languages, a certain class of elements —auxiliaries, negation, and certain
pronominals— are subject to positional restrictions on their distribution which places
them adjacent to wh-phrases. In essence, these elements, like inflected matrix verbs in
V2 languages, must occur in ‘second’ position, where ‘second’ is defined either
prosodically, with respect to the first prosodic word, or structurally, with respect to the
first syntactic constituent. See Rudin 1985 for discussion, and Anderson 1996, 1998 for
a recent approach which attempts to bring the V2 facts into consideration as well. The
account of this phenomenon and its variations is tangential here: of interest is only the
fact that under certain circumstances, these elements may appear within or between
complex wh-XPs in the CP system. This is illustrated for Slovene in (82), from Marvin
1997, where the element of interest is the aspectual auxiliary je, which obligatorily
cliticizes onto the embedded wh-phrase as seen (see also Browne 1974, Boskovic 1995
for Serbo-Croatian; and Legendre 1997 for Macedonian):

(82)   Peter se    je   spras&eval, kako 1 je S&pela popravila t1.               [Slovene]
       P.   REFL AUX asked          what AUX Spela fixed.
       ‘Peter wondered what Spela fixed.’

This also holds for multiple fronted wh-phrases; in such cases, the auxiliary je cliticizes
onto the first of the wh-phrases:

(83)   a.     Nisem      vpras&al, kaj1 je komu2 S&pela kupila t1 t2.

               NEG.I.AUX asked what AUX whom Spela bought
               ‘I didn’t ask what Spela bought for whom.’
       b.      * Nisem     vpras&al, kaj1 komu2 je S&pela kupila t1 t2.

       Under no circumstances, however, can such a cliticized element survive under
sluicing (thanks to T. Marvin for judgments):

(84)   a.      S&pela je    popravila nekako,     a nisem         vpras&al, kako (*je).
               Spela AUX fixed      something but NEG.I.AUX asked what AUX
               ‘Spela fixed something, but I didn’t ask what.’
       b.      S&pela je    kupila nekaj         nekomu,         a nisem       vpras&al,
               Spela AUX bought something someone.DAT but NEG.I.AUX asked
               kaj (*je) komu.
               what AUX who.DAT
               (lit.) ‘Spela bought something for someone, but I didn’t ask what for who.’

       Another kind of data that is relevant in this regard comes from the various
manifestations of non-wh-agreement in the C-system found in several languages. Such
complementizer agreement systems are particularly well-attested within the Germanic
family. The term complementizer agreement, as used in the Germanic literature, refers to
manifestations of agreement with certain features of an embedded subject only, and
should not be confused with complementizers which agree with wh-phrases, as are
found in Austronesian and Celtic. The details of Germanic complementizer agreement
will not be my concern here (see Zwart 1993:3.3 for discussion and references); of
interest here is only the fact that this agreement appears equally well when there is a wh-
phrase in SpecCP, as illustrated in (85) (Luxemburgish, from Zwart 1993:163) and (86)
(Bavarian, from Lobeck 1995:58).

(85)   ... mat wiem (datt) s     de spazéiere ganng bas.                    [Luxemburgish]
            with who that 2sg you walk          gone are.2sg

       ‘... with whom you went for a walk.’

(86)   Du woidd-st    doch kumma, owa mia wissn ned wann-st      (du) kumma woidd-st.
       you wanted-2sg PRT come        but we know not when-2sg you come wanted-2sg
       ‘You wanted to come, but we don’t know when you wanted to come.’

       Lobeck 1995:59 points out that although complementizer agreement can
phonologically cliticize onto a wh-phrase in SpecCP when no overt complementizer is
present, and though sluicing is generally possible in these dialects, nevertheless such
agreement cannot appear in sluicing (her (65)):

(87)   Du woidd-st     doch kumma, owa mia wissn ned wann (*-st).           [Bavarian]
       ‘You wanted to come, but we don’t know when.’

       She relates this fact to the fact that when the verb bearing the matching
agreement features is not present, as in phrasal comparatives, complementizer agreement
is likewise impossible. The data are from Bayer 1984:

(88)   a.    Der Hans is gresser (als) wia -st du bist.                     [Bavarian]
             the Hans is taller   than how-2sg you are-2sg
             ‘Hans is taller than you are.’
       b.    Der Hans is gresser (als) wia(*-st) du.
             the Hans is taller   than how-2sg you
             ‘Hans is taller than you.’

       Lobeck makes a similar point based on the distribution of the complementizer som
in Norwegian, which appears obligatorily in embedded questions with subject

extraction, as in (89a) (modified slightly from Rizzi 1990:57, see also Taraldsen 1986 and
Vikner 1991; likewise for Danish der in spoken registers, if der is indeed in C14):

(89)      Vi vet     hvem *(som) snakker met Marit.                               [Norwegian]
          Vi ved     hvem ??(der ) snakker med Marit.                                  [Danish]
          we know who         C         talks     with Marit
          ‘We know who is talking with Marit.’

Lobeck points out that this som is nevertheless impossible in sluicing, shown in (90) (her
(68), p.60); she suggests that this is because som must agree with INFL (in order to
license the subject trace), which on her account is missing. This assumption assimilates
the deviancy of (90a) to that of the lack of complementizer agreement seen above. The
Danish example in (90b) shows the same contrast (again, if der is in fact in C).

(90)      a.       Noen               snakker met Marit, men vi vet   ikke hvem (*som). [Nor.]
          b.       En eller anden snakker med Marit, men vi ved       ikke hvem (*der). [Dan.]
                   someone            talks     with Marit but we know not who    Co

          If this assumption regarding the nature of the relation between som (and der) and
INFL is correct, then, it provides another case of an illicit non-operator dependency
holding between an element in the C-system and a position or element internal to the
missing IP.

          All of the data presented in this section have one thing in common: under usual
assumptions, the non-operator elements which appear in the C-system originate within
the clause. Consider the first case discussed above, and the most familiar one: V2 in
matrix questions in the Germanic languages. The standard analysis takes the fronted
elements to originate inside IP, either in Io itself (for the English modals and pleonastic
do), or within a lower VP, raising into Io (for have and be in English; in the other

     Thanks to L. Mikkelsen for the Danish data.

languages, almost all verbs can raise). V2 is then triggered in different configurations in
the various languages (in all matrix clauses in all the languages besides English; in matrix
questions, imperatives, ‘negative inversion’, and other very restricted contexts for
English) — crucial here is only that such fronting is Io-to-C o raising (or into whatever
heads the projection whose specifier is the landing site for wh-movement in these
languages). Complementizer agreement, too, is usually analyzed as involving movement
of a functional head or some of its features (Io for Hoekstra and Marácz 1989, AgrSo for
Zwart 1993) from within the IP to Co. (Whether the Norwegian som facts fall into this
line of analysis is unclear; it could be that the problem here is related to the facts
described in the next section.) Finally, for the purposes of the syntax, it is clear that the
Wackernagel clitic elements must originate within the IP: the pronominals satisfy
selectional restrictions, and the auxiliaries determine the form of their verbal
complements. How these clitics come to occupy their observed positions is immaterial,
whether via syntactic (presumably head movement, as is sometimes supposed), or via
phonological mechanisms, as argued persuasively by Anderson 1996, 1998.
       The fact that none of these elements occur in sluicing has a number of possible
       The first is to maintain, as Lobeck 1995: 58-60 does for the facts from Norwegian
and Bavarian, that these facts support a null IP empty category in the syntax. Her
reasoning, which extends equally well to the V2 cases, is straightforward: in the syntax,
there is only [IP e ], hence these elements, in Io, will not be present at all to raise in the first
place. This reasoning is also applicable to the C-agreement facts, as she points out, if
“morphologically realized agreement in COMP ... is contingent on agreement with
embedded INFL” (p. 60). ‘Contingent’ here translates directly into those approaches
which take V2 and C-agreement to express parallel relations of (head-)movement into
Co. Identical reasoning applies to the Wackernagel clitic placement facts of the South
Slavic languages: their origin site is IP-internal, and if IP is empty, by hypothesis, these
elements simply will not be available for either syntactic or phonological operations to

       While this argument seems reasonable, it rests on a very questionable assumption.
Recall that under the empty structure approach, the wh-phrase is base-generated in
SpecCP, and binds nothing at S-structure (or, perhaps, binds the IP empty category itself,
to extend Haïk’s 1987 proposal that the relative operator in antecedent-contained
deletions binds the VP empty category: see Kennedy and Merchant 1997 for
discussion). But if this is the case, what prevents us from base-generating any of the
non-operator elements in their landing sites or ‘moved’ positions external to IP, fully
parallel to the case of the wh-phrase? It would seem that we would have to stipulate a
difference between operator binding, which can be voided at S-structure (or Haïk-bind a
categorially distinct empty category), and head-binding (for V2, complementizer
agreement, and possible the S.Slavic Wackernagel clitics).
       But such a distinction seems mostly unmotivated. One might argue that the
difference is not in the category but in the level of the category: the wh-phrase is an XP,
and by hypothesis binds the empty XP (IP), while the heads Xo cannot do so. If this
were so, however, taken in conjunction with Lobeck’s 1995 analysis of VP-ellipsis as
also consisting of a null VP ([VP e ]), we might expect VP-ellipsis with ‘raised’ auxiliaries
in Io to be impossible, assuming that these elements are heads exceptionally base-
generated in Io (usually, of course, the auxiliaries in question —aspectual have, and
progressive, passive, and copular be— must originate in a lower Vo projection). This is

(91)   a.     I’ve been writing, and Bill has, too.
       b.     Frank is learning Swahili because Marsha is.
       c.     Max was arrested, but Andy wasn’t.
       d.     Cathy is a doctor, and so is her husband.

Under Lobeck’s analysis, these have the structure in (92):

(92)             IP

            DP         I'

       Marsha Io             VP
              |               |
              is             ∅

       The force of this objection, however, is very little, since Potsdam 1996 has shown
that a structure like that in (92) is incorrect for the sentences in (91).     He argues
convincingly that such sentences derive from the following structure (1996: 83-88):

(93)              IP

            DP          I'

       Marsha Io     VP
              isv Vo VP
                   |     |
                  tv    ∅

       The objection does go through, however, for the Irish data discussed in
McCloskey 1991a (and the Hebrew data in Doron 1990, 1999). McCloskey argues that
Irish displays a phenomenon of predicate-ellipsis similar to VP-ellipsis in English; the
difference arises from the fact that Irish subjects remain low (not in SpecIP), while Irish
verbs raise (say, to Io). ‘VP’-ellipsis applied to such a structure will yield apparently
verb-only sentences, as in (94):

(94)   Cheannaigh siad teach?
       bought           they house
       ‘Did they buy a house?’
       a.        Cheannaigh.
                 ‘(Yes,) They did.’

       b.     Níor       cheannaigh.
              NEG.PAST bought
              ‘(No,) They didn’t.’

These elliptical answers, McCloskey argues, have the structure in (95) (updating his
1991a proposal slightly to reflect his 1996 arguments for a (slightly) VP-external subject,
though it is unclear whether an elided VP-internal subject might not be able to avoid
overt raising in any case, parallel in some respects to There were rabbits in the garden
today, though there weren’t yesterday):

(95)         IP


           Io      FP
           |        |
       cheannaighv ∅

       If such ‘displaced’ heads need to bind an empty element before LF-
reconstruction, then head-binding of a maximal (empty) category must be
countenanced. If such head-binding is simply not a requirement whatsoever, and if only
true operators must bind an empty category at every stage of the derivation (as in
Koopman and Sportiche 1982), then the ungrammaticality of the sluicing cases above
cannot follow from this line of argument.
       Another possible strategy would be to claim that while such head-binding is licit,
the problem in the sluicing cases is that more than one element —the wh-phrase and the
head-material— must bind the empty IP category simultaneously.            Any version of
Koopman and Sportiche’s Bijection Principle would then rule out such multiple
‘displacements’. However, this logic too fails to go through consistently, given the data
discussed in Kennedy and Merchant 1997. There, it is shown that comparative ellipsis is
licit with pseudogapping, as shown in (96a), with the presumed structure in (96b)
(where the order of the remnant and null VP is irrelevant):

(96)    a.      Jack read a longer magazine than Abby did a book.
        b.      ... than CP

                     Op        C'

                          Co        IP

                           Abby          I'

                                  Io    VP
                                 did VP    DPremnant
                                     ∅    a book

What this entails on the base-generation view of ellipsis is that the VP-external remnant
must bind the VP empty category at the same time the DegP operator in SpecCP does
(this argument rests upon the idea that ‘displaced’ remnants would have to ‘bind’ the
ellipsis site like other ‘displaced’ elements, parallel to the head cases in sluicing above;
again, if only operators are subject to the requirement, these facts are irrelevant).
        In sum, under the standard null IP category approach to sluicing, there seems little
reason to believe that whatever mechanism licenses the base-generation of a wh-phrase
in SpecCP with concomitant later satisfaction (at LF, under standard assumptions) of its
binding requirements wouldn’t also license the base-generation of heads, agreement, or
Wackernagel clitics in these ‘displaced’ positions in exactly the same way.15
        Under the deletion approach pursued here, on the other hand, the data fall out
under an ordering solution: if deletion of the IP material precedes the (head) movement

   The Wackernagel clitics present a special case, since it seems clear that the mechanisms regulating
their ordering are phonological, and not syntactic, so it is possible to give an independent argument
ruling them out in sluicing structures, along the following lines. Assume Anderson 1996 and
Legendre 1997 are correct: Alignment constraints at PF require these clitics to be as close to the left
edge of the clause as possible, with other constraints making sure that ‘as close as possible’ is realized
as either one prosodic word or one XP (prosodic phrase) removed from the actual left edge. This
prosodic material is supplied by the syntax, but, by assumption, the syntax does not impose any
particular order on these elements beyond what is required for auxiliaries, negation, and arguments in
general. If this is the case, then under sluicing, we would have to have exceptional base-generation of
these elements (which I will assume are heads, not phrases) external to IP. Given constraints on
adjunction, this means that they would have to occur in or adjoined to Co, since neither CP, IP, nor the
wh-phrase in SpecCP, being maximal projections, are licit adjunction sites for a head.

and prosodic reordering operations responsible for the appearance of IP-internal
morphology in the C-system, none of this material will appear. The question to be asked
at this point is whether there is a principled way to derive this ordering, beyond simply
stipulating it. Some considerations suggest that there is. First, a general point: it seems
that such prosodic reordering operations are fairly ‘late’ processes, fed by syntax but
not necessarily generated by syntax (this is most obvious for the case of clitics, though
similar remarks apply to I-to-C movement as well).
      Theoretically, this state of affairs seems to be a reflection of economy (both of
economy of derivation and of representation, to the extent that these differ). Simply put,
if deletion is possible with these elements, it is preferred. Consider the case of I-to-C
movement. This movement is usually thought to be driven by some strong feature of C
which must be checked by a matching feature on I (see Holmberg and Platzack 1995,
etc.). Under normal conditions, movement of I into C can be non-overt (occurring at LF)
only if this feature is weak — in this case, only the feature itself need move at LF, since
PF pied-piping considerations will not apply. Under this theory, PF requirements force
‘pied-piping’ when a strong feature is checked. This is usually thought to be because
the bare feature would not be able to be spelled out at PF. But it might just as well be
the case that the PF crash is caused by the lack of an item corresponding to the feature
bundle remaining in I, now lacking the moved feature. There seems no way to decide
between these alternatives.
      But now consider the case where ellipsis can apply as well. One way to interpret
the facts above, consistent with the standard approaches to I-to-C movement, is to
assume that it is indeed the remnant feature bundle which is causing the PF crash.
Under IP ellipsis, minimal feature movement out of I into C will be possible without pied-
piping the rest of I, since the remnant feature bundle left behind in I will not need to be
pronounced; this was implicit in the proposal regarding the ellipsis feature E above.
Note that this turns Chomsky’s 1995 ‘feature’-pied-piping convention on its head: it is
the partial remnant which triggers the PF-crash, not the bare feature itself, which has no

phonological content by itself. This line of analysis is also in line with the general idea
that I-to-C movement occurs at PF, as mooted in Chomsky 1995.16
        Another interpretation of the facts would be to suggest that contrary to standard
analyses, it is a strong feature in I that drives I-to-C movement. Since unchecked strong
features cause a PF crash, this will force overt I-to-C movement in the regular range of
cases. But again an interesting exception emerges under ellipsis: if the IP is deleted, the
strong feature on I does not reach the PF interface, avoiding the crash. (This is exactly
the logic that will be applied to several cases in chapter 5.)                At this stage, I see no
compelling reason to adopt one of the interpretations of the evidence over the other,
both appearing equally viable for the case at hand, and will leave the question open.17
        To summarize, the fact that IP-internal elements that usually appear in the C-
system do not appear there under sluicing is compatible with the deletion account
pursued here, and do not, as sometimes assumed, support a null-category approach over
deletion.         Base-generated COMP-internal elements

The logic applied to elements moved into the C-system above does not extend to the
data to be considered in this section. Here, I will consider material that is usually
analyzed as being base-generated in COMP, in the Co head. While English will be of no
use here, due to the effects of the Doubly-Filled Comp-Filter, we can examine languages
that do not obey this filter, languages that allow an overt complementizer to co-occur
with a wh-phrase in SpecCP. Certain varieties of Dutch present one example, as the
following examples show ((97a) modified from Bennis 1986: 234, (97b) from Zwart
1993: 169; see also den Besten 1978: 647, 1989).
   Though this idea has some familiar difficulties, including the licensing of negative polarity items
in subject position by a negative auxiliary raised to C, as shown in McCloskey 1996:89 (102).
Perhaps PF movement is triggered in these cases by a feature which prefigures a parallel raising in the
LF component.
   Note that at least the Co[+wh] must be present to trigger the attested wh-movement; if the [+wh] on C is
strong as usually assumed for English, we have evidence that the deletion targets IP, not C' — if C'

(97)   a.      Ik weet niet, wie (of) (dat) hij gezien heeft.          [(esp. Southern) Dutch]
                   I know not who if that he seen has
                   ‘I don’t know who he has seen.’
       b.      Hy freget wa (of) *(’t)         jûn     komt.                            [Frisian]
               he asks who if           that.CL tonight comes
               ‘He’s asking who’s coming tonight.’

       The example (97a) has the structure given in (98) (whether or not the displaced
wie has moved through the specifier of dat is immaterial, here, though see Zwart
1993:sec. 5.2.2 for evidence that it does not). In this tree, I use recursive CP labels for
simplicity; the different projections have been identified as WhP and TopP (see Müller
and Sternefeld 1993, Zwart 1993, Rizzi 1995, and below).

(98)          CP                   [=WhP]

       wie2         C'

              C          CP        [=TopP]
              |           |
              of         C'

                    C         IP
                   dat   hij t2 gezien heeft

       Given this structure, we might expect that either the CP headed by dat (TopP) or
the IP complement to dat might be elidable. If the presence of of in (97) is simply the
overt counterpart to the null Co[+wh] complementizer in English embedded questions,
as is usually supposed, then it should bear all the relevant features to license an elliptical
complement. Similarly, if wie moves through the specifier of dat, we might expect that it
could bear the relevant agreement features that could license a null IP complement.

were targeted, the offending [+wh] feature would be eliminated without triggering wh-movement into

However, as we see in (99) and (100), neither of these possibilities is attested; the only
grammatical sluice is one in which only the wh-phrase itself remains (Jelle Gerbrandy,

(99)     Hij heeft iemand gezien, maar ik weet niet                              [Dutch]
         he has someone seen        but   I know not
         a.    wie.
         b.    * wie of.
         c.    * wie dat.
         d.    * wie of dat.
                 who if that
         ‘He saw someone, but I don’t know who.’
(100) Ien        komt jûn,         en hy freget                                  [Frisian]
         someone comes tonight and he asks
         a.    wa.
         b.    * wa of.
         c.    * wa ’t.
         d.    * wa     of ’t.
                  who if that.CL
         ‘Someone’s coming tonight, and he’s asking who.’

         A similar case is provided by Slovene, as discussed in Marvin 1997. As in Dutch,
Slovene also allows for complementizers to co-occur with fronted wh-phrases; whether
the complementizer is the interrogative C ali ‘whether’ or the declarative C da ‘that’ is
determined by the matrix predicate. The following examples are from Marvin 1997: 50.

(101) a.       Rad bi       vedel, koga da     je   Peter videl.
               glad SUBJ know whom C[-wh] AUX Peter seen
               ‘I would like to know who Peter saw.’

       b.     Spras&ujm se,       koga ali          S&pela ljubi.
              I.ask      REFL whom C[+wh] Spela loves
              ‘I wonder who Spela loves.’
       c.     Nisem ga vpras&al, komu kaj da                  zameri.
              not      him I.asked whom what C[-wh] blames
              ‘I didn’t ask him who he blames for what.’

In no case, however, can any of the complementizers co-occur with the remnant wh-
phrase(s) in sluicing (T. Marvin, p.c.):

(102) a.      Peter je    videl nekoga in rad bi              vedel, koga (*da).
              Peter AUX seen someone and glad SUBJ know whom that
              ‘Peter saw someone and I would like to know who.’
       b.     S&pela ljubi nekoga, a nisem              vpras&al, koga (*ali).
              Spela loves someone but I.not.AUX asked            who    if
              ‘Spela loves someone, but I didn’t ask who.’
       c.     Nekomu            nekaj      ocita,      a nisem          ga vpras&al, komu
              someone.DAT something he.blames but not.I.AUX him asked who.DAT
              kaj (*da).
              what that
              ‘He blames someone for something, but I didn’t ask him who he blames for

       Likewise for the various complementizers that can co-occur with operators in
Irish (J. McCloskey, p.c.):

(103) Cheannaigh sé leabhar inteacht ach níl          fhios        agam céacu ceann (*a / *ar).
       bought         he book     some     but knowledge which one Ctrace / Cpro
       ‘He bought a book, but I don’t know which.’

        And for stacked complementizers in (some registers of) Danish (L. Mikkelsen,
p.c.), which I gloss simply as ‘C’ (see Vikner 1991):

(104) Vi ved      hvem (som) (at) der snakker med Marit.                 [(colloq.) Danish]
        we know who     C       C C talks     with Marit
        ‘We know who is talking with Marit.’
(105) En eller anden snakker med Marit, men vi ved         ikke
        someone         talks    with Marit but we know not
        a.     hvem.
        b.     * hvem som.
        c.     * hvem som der.
        d.     * hvem at.
        e.     * hvem at der.
        f.     * hvem som at der.

        In these cases, appealing to an IP-internal origin for the non-operator material, as
Lobeck does for the Bavarian and Norwegian cases reviewed above, obviously cannot
        Given the split CP system, then, two questions arise for a Lobeck-style analysis:
first, why can’t the IP complement of Top elide leaving Who, Top o, or both intact, and
second, why can TopP elide only if C[+wh] is empty?
        Under Lobeck’s system, the answer to the first question comes from the
hypothesis that a head that licenses the null IP-proform must agree with a wh-XP in its
specifier position: since the wh-XP in these examples never passes through SpecTopP,
the necessary spec-head relationship is never established, and the Top head does not
have the appropriate features to license a null complement.
        The answer to the second question is more involved. If we assume that the
projection of functional structure is uniform across languages (as in Cinque to appear,
for example), then what we have been assuming for the structure of sluices has been too

simple. Instead, we have two options for the phrase structure of sluices, illustrated in
(106) and (107):

(106)        CP               [=WhP]

        wh-XP     C'

           C[+wh]      CP     [=TopP]

(107)        CP               [=WhP]

        wh-XP     C'

           C[+wh]      CP     [=TopP]

             C[+top]        IP

The second structure, in (107), bears more resemblence to the structure traditionally
assumed for sluices, as in (2) above, in that it posits an empty IP node. But if the wh-XP
does not move through SpecTopP, we do not expect such a null element to be licensed.
        An immediate side question arises, of course: could the fronting of a topic-XP to
SpecTopP license such a null complement? Answering this question is complicated by
the fact that in general, topicalization in the languages that provide the best evidence for
such a phrase structure (the continental West Germanic varieties) cannot co-occur with
a fronted wh-XP:

(108) a.        * Wann      {hast} den Wagen {hast} du gemietet?                  [German]
        b.      * Wanneer {heb} de auto      {heb} je    gehuurd?                  [Dutch]
                  when       have the car        have you rented
                (‘When did you rent the car?’)

(I use a weak pronoun subject in German here to ensure that the object has not
scrambled over the subject; object-over-subject scrambling is not possible in Dutch in
any case.) Since overtly filling both SpecWhP and SpecTopP seems to be impossible in
these languages, for unclear reasons, this side question cannot be answered, at least on
the basis of Dutch or German.
        Still, the absence of a Doubly-Filled Comp Filter effect in Dutch, Frisian, and
Slovene leaves the ill-formedness of (99), (100), and (102), respectively, mysterious. One
possibility is that the ill-formedness of this kind of example is related to, or indeed the
same as, classical COMP-trace effects like those in (109).

(109) a.        * Who did Lex say that __ kissed Lois?
        b.      * Which guy did Jimmy wonder if __ had kissed Lois?

        If the COMP-trace effect is a PF effect, as several lines of evidence suggest (see
chapter 5, § 5.2.2), then sluicing structures will trigger a violation just as examples like
those in (109). For concreteness, let us assume a filter of the form in (110), while
recognizing its limitations (in subject relatives, inapplicability to pro-drop languages, etc;
see Perlmutter 1971).18

(110) * [C α ] [x ... ] , where x is a prosodic constituent containing no phonetic
        exponence, if α is phonetically null

This seems to work at first sight for Dutch and Frisian, where (111) is bad:

   See also Kayne 1994:94 for the suggestion that something like the COMP-trace effect applies to
rule out overt Cs in relative clauses in Amharic and other languages with N-final relative clauses
(which for Kayne have the structure [ IP2 [ the [ CP [ NP picture] [ C [ IP t 2 ] ]]]], with the IP complement
to C fronted past the determiner head. Unfortunately, this suggestion runs directly counter to his
analysis of final complementizers on p. 53, where he analyzes [IP C] orders in languages like
Japanese as the result of IP movement into SpecCP: [CP IP 2 [C [ IP t2 ] ]]. In these latter cases, the C can
be overt.

(111) a.       * Wie vraag je je                af of __ hem heeft gezien?                  [Dutch]
      b.       * Wa fregest           dy    ôf oft __ hem          sjoen hat?               [Frisian]
                 who ask         you REFL PRT if           him has seen      has
               (‘Who were you wondering if __ saw him?’)

But in fact the deviance of (111) cannot be distinguished from the fact that in these
languages, as in German, argument extraction from any position out of embedded
questions leads to greater deviancy than in English:

(112) a.       * Wie vraag je je            af of zij __ heeft gezien?                      [Dutch]
      b.       * Wa fregest           dy    ôf oft se __         sjoen hat?                 [Frisian]
                 who ask      you REFL PRT if she            has seen     has
               (‘Who were you wondering if she saw __?’)

In fact, Dutch and Frisian do not exhibit the classical case of the COMP-trace effect,
namely with extraction of subjects of non-wh CPs:

(113) a.       Wie denk          je    dat __ komt?                             [Dutch]
      b.       Wa tinkst               dat __ komt?                             [Frisian]
               who think.2sg you that            comes
               ‘Who do you think that __ is coming?’

      Such an account runs into an identical problem in Slovene, which also lacks the
that-trace effect (Marvin 1997:51):

(114) Kdo je     Peter mislil,        da   je     pris&el?
      who AUX Peter thought that AUX come
      ‘Who did Peter think that __ came?’

         One can salvage this approach by relativizing the filter to apply only to [+wh]

(115) * C [+wh] [x ... ] , where x is a prosodic constituent containing no phonetic
         exponence, if C[+wh] is phonetically null

         This would correctly rule out all the desired cases, while applying superfluously in
cases like (111).
         Another possibility would be to appeal to inherent cliticization properties of the
C s in question: if it could be shown that these elements must cliticize onto phonological
material to their right, we would have an independent explanation for the ill-formedness
of (99b,c). It is certainly true that complementizers show a high degree of susceptibility
to prosodic incorporation into following domains, at least in right-branching languages
(see Shlonsky 1988 and McCloskey 1996 for discussion of rightward dependencies in
the C-domain in Hebrew and Irish, respectively).19
         Note that both of these alternatives locate the ill-formedness of examples with
complementizers under sluicing at PF.20 The first —assimilating these to some kind of
generalized COMP-trace effect— might even extend to much of the data discussed in
the previous section. Although only further work will determine if these suggestions

   This also recalls the suggestion sometimes made (see Lightfoot 1998 for a recent version) that
reduced auxiliaries in English morphosyntactically cliticize to their right (though prosodically to
their left), accounting for the impossibility of getting these before ellipsis and movement sites. But
see Pullum and Zwicky 1997 for a serious complication in this picture based on the contrast in (i),
among others:
         (i)     a.      He is SO going!
                 b.      * He’s SO going!
   These have the pleasant side effect of perhaps being able to accommodate certain ameliorations to
apparent ‘if/whether’ sluices when these are followed immediately by certain elements, as in (i),
modified slightly from Winkler 1997: 30 (33c) (see also Klein 1993), and in reverse sluicing
examples like (ii) as analyzed in Giannakidou and Merchant 1998.
         (i)     Bitte laß mich hören, wie Ralf reagiert und ob *(überhaupt).
                 please let me hear how Ralf reacts and if           at.all
                 ‘Please let me know how R reacts if at all.’
         (ii)    Magdalena worried about whether and how to break the news to her father.
                 (Giannakidou and Merchant 1998: 239 (18a))
These facts recall the ‘adverb intervention’ improvements to COMP-trace effects; see chapter 5,

bear fruit independently of accounting for the data discussed here, they do seem to me
to place the problem in the correct arena, even if they do defer formalization until more is
known about the processes that operate at the PF interface. These solutions strike me as
more likely to be on the right track than, say, a structural solution that would stipulate
that sluicing deletes a C', not an IP, given that it is difficult to identify other instances of
rules that target non-maximal projections. Note that the these proposals also have the
salutory effect of reducing the demands on the nature of the material in the C-system:
unlike Lobeck’s 1995 proposal, we do not need to stipulate that SpecCP must be
overtly filled (a strange stipulation even in her system, since no similar requirement is
found for ‘strong agreement’ in the NP or VP ellipsis cases she discusses).

       I conclude this section with a brief remark on the only potential counterexample
to the sluicing-COMP generalization in (71) known to me, from Hungarian. In wh-
questions in Hungarian, the wh-phrase does not move into SpecCP overtly, occurring
instead in a ‘focus’ position immediately preceding the verb (see Puskás 1998 for
discussion and references; I only consider non-multiple wh-questions here). This wh-
phrase can co-occur with the complementizer hogy ‘that’, as seen in (116) (thanks to D.
Farkas and G. Puskás for judgments):

(116) Nem emlékszem, (hogy) kivel            találkoztak a gyerekek.
       not   I.remember that      who.with met           the children
       ‘I don’t remember who the kids met with.’

       Somewhat surprisingly, from the above perspective, the same options appear
under sluicing: while the complementizer may be omitted, it may also be retained:

(117) A gyerekek találkoztak valakivel           de nem emlékszem, (hogy) kivel.
       the children met          someone.with but not I.remember that          who.with
       ‘The kids met with someone, but I don’t remember who.’

        Hungarian      therefore     represents     a   prima facie counterexample              to    the
generalization in (71) — there seems no reason not to assume that hogy in (117) is in its
usual C position.21 The difference between this case and those discussed above is of
course that in (117) the wh-phrase itself is not in COMP, remaining low in the structure,
presumably in the position it occupies in (116). It might seem that the sluicing-COMP
generalization only applies if the wh-phrase itself has moved to SpecCP. But notice that
if either of the above prosodic approaches suggested above are correct, this state of
affairs is exactly what we expect, since in Hungarian, the (sluiced) wh-phrase will follow
the complementizer, satisfying either of the above mooted constraints. Especially the
ban on complementizers in sluicing seems to be related to the fact that these
complementizers would end up adjacent to the ellipsis site, which is not the case in
Hungarian. 22

2.3     Summary

There are two main results to be taken away from this chapter. First, the wh-phrase that
appears in sluicing is not a floating ghost, a mysterious fragment XP integrated in some

    Similarly for the Japanese [+wh] complementizer ka in (118) below, if these structures are indeed
parallel to true sluicing as in English in the first place.
    The case of Hindi seems to be slightly more complicated — while it is like Hungarian in placing
wh-phrases in a ‘focus’ position preverbally, it nonetheless disallows complementizers in sluicing, as
in English, Dutch, etc. A further wrinkle is introduced in that the presence of the complementizer,
unlike in Hungarian, is not wholly optional. Embedded CPs in Hindi, as in German, can occur either
‘extraposed’, clause-finally, or ‘topicalized’, clause-initially; see section In final position,
the presence of the complementizer ki is highly preferred, while in initial position it is impossible:
(i) a.     mujhe nahi$i$ pataa          thaa [CP ??(ki) Gautam ne kis se baat kii             thii].
           I. DAT NEG knowledge PAST              that Gautam ERG who with talk do.PFV PAST
     b.    [ CP (*ki) Gautam ne kis se baat kii              thii], mujhe (yeh) nahi$i$ pataa       thaa.
                  that Gautam ERG who with talk do.PFV PAST I. DAT it NEG knowledge PAST
           ‘I didn’t know who Gautam had talked to.’
         While it is thus unsurprising that fronted sluiced CPs also disallow ki, shown in (iib), the fact
that final sluices as in (iia) also prohibit ki is unexpected:
(ii) a.    Gautam ne kisi            se baat kii         thii lekin mujhe nahi$i$ pataa      [(*ki) kis
           Gautam ERG someone with talk do.PFV PAST but I.DAT NEG knowledge that who with
     b.    Gautam ne kisi             se baat kii       thii lekin [(*ki) kis se] mujhe nahi$i$ pataa.
           Gautam ERG someone with talk do.PFV PAST but               that who with I.DAT NEG knowledge
           ‘Gautam talked with someone, but I don’t know who.’
Thanks to R. Bhatt for these data and discussion.

strange and unspecified way into the surrounding syntax. Instead, the sluiced wh-
phrase sits in its usual position, in SpecCP, and occurs exactly in those circumstances
where we would expect an interrogative CP. This conclusion leads us to the second
main result: that there is a missing IP in sluicing and some structure internal to this
missing IP — CP must dominate IP, and the wh-phrase must originate somewhere. This
second result requires that we develop a theory of the distribution —the licensing— of
such null IPs. It was seen that the conditions under which an IP can go missing are
sensitive to the kind of features present on the C sister of the IP. Although such a
relation has usually been treated in terms of government, an alternative based on local
feature distribution (implemented either by base-generation or featural/head movement)
is equally up to the task, and allows us to state the theory of ellipsis in terms of deletion
at PF, which we will see has very desirable consequences. Happily, stating the licensing
conditions in terms of a feature also gives us a hook to hang our semantics on, unifying
for the first time the licensing and identification requirements. Finally, a range of new
facts were brought to light, embodied in the Sluicing-COMP generalization: in sluicing,
no non-operator material may appear in COMP. This surprising fact seemed to fit in best
with the view of ellipsis advocated here: that prosodic constraints, acting in league with
economy constraints, serve to restrict the kinds of material that can occur outside,
adjacent to, the target of deletion.

Appendix: Wh-in-situ languages

An obvious question is posed by wh-in-situ languages.           Do such languages have
sluicing in the form found in languages with wh-movement, the focus of our attention
throughout? If so, what mechanisms drive the movement that feeds the deletion? How
is it that this movement is seen only with sluicing, and not otherwise (since wh-
movement in these languages does not generally occur overtly)? While these questions
are interesting and important, it is beyond the scope of the present inquiry to be able to
delve deeply into them.       The literature on these questions is most extensive for
Japanese, where several approaches to the relevant data have been pursued.              An
example of ‘sluicing’ in Japanese is given in (118); data of this sort were apparently first
noted in Inoue 1976, 1978.

(118) Abby-ga      dareka-o        mi-ta    ga, watashi-wa dare ka wakaranai.
       Abby- NOM someone- ACC see-PAST but I-TOP             who Q know.not
       ‘Abby saw someone, but I don’t know who.’

       There have been several approaches to this kind of data.           Takahashi 1994
proposes that there is, exceptionally, a kind of wh-movement in Japanese (‘scrambling’
to SpecCP), followed by deletion, giving structures essentially equivalent to their
English congeners. His analysis has been widely criticized, however, both from analysts
who follow an LF- or post-LF copying approach (Nishigauchi 1998; and for one sort of
sluicing, Fukaya 1998 and Hoji and Fukaya 1999) and those who defend an analysis of
‘sluicing’ as a reduced cleft structure (Shimoyama 1995, Kuwabara 1996, Nishiyama et
al. 1996, Kizu 1997, Merchant 1998a, and for another sort of sluicing, Hoji and Fukaya
1999; see chapter 4, §4.2 for reasons why such an approach is not tenable for English).
       My own limited exploration of this kind of data in Japanese and Chinese
suggests a similar conclusion, namely that what appears to be sluicing in these languages
is the result of operations different from the movement + deletion derivation found in

languages with overt wh-movement. This dovetails with the conclusions of Nishiyama
et al. 1996 and Kizu 1997 for Korean and Chinese as well.
       The situation in languages like Hungarian, Hindi, and Turkish is somewhat less
clear. In these languages, wh-phrases occur in a specified position adjacent to the verb;
in Hindi and Turkish, which are strong SOV languages, this means that the wh-phrase
typically occurs clause-internally, following other sentence-internal elements. Here the
limited data available to me are mixed. While Hindi does seem to possess structures that
at least superficially resemble sluicing in English (see for example the data in section, Kizu 1997 has claimed that Turkish lacks these, requiring instead some form of
the copula. My own limited informant work has indicated that while such cleft-like
structures are clearly preferable, it is not clear whether more English-like sluicing
structures are completely unacceptable. For multiple sluicing, for example (see chapter 4,
§4.1 for a brief discussion), the copula can be absent.
       One possibility is that Hindi and Turkish, to the extent that sluicing structures
pattern with those found in overt wh-movement languages like English, are employing a
scrambling-type movement to create the input structures for deletion, and not using
‘true’ wh-movement to SpecCP (i.e., scrambling as adjunction to IP, followed by
deletion of the lower IP segment). Another possibility is that whatever constraint
prevents overt movement into SpecCP is ameliorated by the deletion itself, however
such an idea is implemented (one possibility, following the reasoning concerning I-to-C
movement above, would be to argue that the traces of wh-movement in these languages
would trigger some kind of PF crash that deletion repairs, for example).
       These questions seem to me to be fairly straightforward ones of fact and analysis.
Unfortunately, I will not be able to resolve these issues at this point, and leave them to
specialists in the relevant languages; important though is that nothing from these
languages seems inherently incompatible with the overall approach taken here.


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