# Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments

Robin Lemke

Open Germanic Linguistics 1

Open Germanic Linguistics

Editors: Michael T. Putnam, B. Richard Page, Laura Catharine Smith

In this series:

1. Lemke, Robin. Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments.

Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments

Robin Lemke

Robin Lemke. 2021. *Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments* (Open Germanic Linguistics 1). Berlin: Language Science Press.

 Writing the thesis, conducting the research reported here and turning it into this book would not have been possible without the help, support and advice of a lot of people whom I'd like to thank in what follows.

First of all, there are my supervisors Ingo Reich, Heiner Drenhaus and Oliver Bott. Without Ingo this book would not exist, not only because he started project B3 in the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB, Collaborative Research Center) 1102, in whose context the research reported here was conducted, but also because of his way of supervising my PhD thesis. I am grateful to him for always being there for discussing methodological and theoretical issues and for his valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. I would like to thank Heiner, my second supervisor, for the extremely helpful discussions and suggestions on theoretical issues, statistical analysis and the presentation of my results as well as comments on previous versions of the manuscript. I am very grateful to Oliver, my external supervisor, for his comments both in the review and during my PhD defense.

I would also like to thank the other members of my doctoral committee, Julia Knopf, Elke Teich and Stefan Thater, for their time and their questions during my PhD defense. The research reported in this book has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation).1

When I began thinking about the possibility of working on a PhD thesis, I was certain that I wanted to do this a collaborative environment. Fortunately, in Saarbrücken I found that, both within SFB 1102 and the Department of Modern German Linguistics. I would like to thank everybody with whom I discussed aspects of this work at the joint colloquium of the German and English studies, the SFB's PhD days and of course at the conferences where I could present my research thanks to the DFG's generous funding.

Some colleagues in Saarbrücken helped me out with more specific issues: I would like to thank Philipp Rauth for always sharing his expertise in generative syntax, Julia Stark for drawing the visual stimuli used in experiment 2 and allowing me to publish them in this book and Simon Ostermann for sharing the

1Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – Projektnummer 232722074 – SFB 1102.

language model file for pre-processing DeScript. I am particularly indebted to Lisa Schäfer, with whom I shared the office, conference travel and the corresponding leisure, hikes, food and beers during most of the time that I worked on my thesis. She also contributed to preprocessing the DeScript corpus and spent a lot of time proof-reading and commenting on previous versions of this work. I would also like to thank the (former) student assistants Luise Ehrmantraut, Fabian Ehrmantraut, Jonathan Watkins, Natascha Kraushaar and Matt Kuhn for helping with the annotation of production data, the construction of experimental materials and – in the case of Matt – proofreading large parts of the thesis.

At this point, I would like to acknowledge my professors and lecturers at Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, in particular Guido Mensching, Anke Lüdeling, Manfred Krifka, Anton Benz and Hubert Truckenbrodt (in order of appearance), who raised my interest in linguistics, convinced me of the importance of doing empirical and quantitative research, and/or allowed me to conduct my first experiments and corpus studies.

The people mentioned so far supported me in one way or another in writing my thesis or even thinking about doing so. For allowing me to publish it in a way that makes the results of my research publicly accessible, I thank the Open Germanic Linguistics series editors, Michael T. Putnam, Laura Catharine Smith and Richard Page and everybody at Language Science Press. In particular, I am grateful to Stefan Müller, Sebastian Nordhoff and Felix Kopecky for their support during the preparation of the final manuscript, the Language Science Press community proof-readers for their time and John T. Hale for providing a very detailed and helpful review on the manuscript.

Schließlich möchte ich meiner Familie und meinen Freund\*innen für moralische und logistische Unterstützung in dieser Zeit danken, insbesondere Madaida, Jan, Heike und Julia für zeitaufwändiges Katzenhüten und -taxifahrten. Meinen Eltern Heike, Matthias, Andreas und Carmen und Großeltern Edith und Fritz danke ich dafür, mich während meinem Studium und davor immer unterstützt zu haben.

# **1 Introduction**

The concept of *sentence* occupies a central position in linguistic theory. In (generative) syntax, well-formed expressions are dominated by a node that is related to sententiality, which was originally labeled as S(entence) (see e.g. Chomsky 1965) and which has been more recently redefined as the complementizer phrase (CP) or a CP layer (Rizzi 1997). This layer is taken to host different speech act-related features, such as sentence mood in Rizzi's (1997) ForceP and assertivity (Krifka 1995). From a semantic perspective, it is generally assumed that only sentences can be used to perform speech acts and to communicate propositions.

This theoretically motivated requirement for well-formed utterances to be sentential clashes with linguistic reality. Morgan (1973) observed more than forty years ago that speakers produce nonsentential utterances which still fulfill the same communicative function as their sentential counterparts. For instance, the utterance in (1a) lacks an inflected verb and a subject. At least in this specific context however, (1a) is pragmatically interpreted as being meaning-equivalent to the full sentence in (1b). Morgan (1973) proposed the term *fragment* for these nonsentential utterances, which I adopt in this book.1

	- a. Another slice?
	- b. Would you like another slice of pizza?

This book addresses two main research questions which are investigated with experimental methods: First, what is the syntactic structure of these expressions? And, second, why do speakers2 use fragments at all?

1The term *fragment* is roughly meaning-equivalent to that of *nonsentential utterance* used elsewhere (Fernández & Ginzburg 2002, Barton & Progovac 2005, Stainton 2006). None of these notions is theory-neutral, since *fragment* suggests that the utterance is incomplete, whereas the notion of *nonsentential utterance* implies that it is not underlyingly sentential. Besides being more in line with my empirical findings on sententiality I use the notion *fragment* because it has been proposed earlier in the literature for this phenomenon.

2This work focuses on spoken and written language. The term *speaker* refers to the person who produces an utterance and the term *hearer* to the person who processes it. The overarching ideas and results on the question of why people produce a reduced or a syntactically complete utterance might be applied to sign language, what might be investigated in future research.

### 1 Introduction

## **1.1 What is the syntactic structure of fragments?**

The apparent violation of standard assumptions about phrase structure in fragments challenges syntactic theory: For instance, a grammar that requires all wellformed structures to contain an inflected matrix verb is not able to derive a bare DP fragment like (1a). This mismatch between the nonsentential form and the sentential function of fragments has been relatively extensively investigated in theoretical linguistics (see e.g. Morgan 1973, Ginzburg & Sag 2000, Fernández & Ginzburg 2002, Schlangen 2003, Merchant 2004a, Barton & Progovac 2005, Culicover & Jackendoff 2005, Stainton 2006, Reich 2007, Weir 2014a, Ott & Struckmeier 2016), but there is no consensus on the theoretic analysis of fragments. In particular, it is unclear whether fragments result from ellipsis in full sentences, which are derived by the standard syntax rules, or whether fragments require modifications to syntactic theory that allow for the derivation of subsentential output. Furthermore, for now the competing theories rely almost exclusively on partially conflicting introspective data. The first part of the book (Chapters 2 and 3) presents a series of acceptability rating and production studies that investigate the predictions of the competing theories. These experiments provide the first empirical investigation of a set of diverging predictions of the competing theories of fragments.

I focus on three generative accounts of fragments: the *nonsentential* account (e.g. Barton & Progovac 2005, Progovac 2006), the information structure-based *in situ deletion* account (Reich 2007, Ott & Struckmeier 2016) and the *movement and deletion* account (Merchant 2004a, Weir 2014a). These theories make relatively general testable predictions on fragments, such as the requirement that all fragments must be able to appear in the left periphery according to Merchant (2004a). I do not investigate HPSG accounts of fragments (Ginzburg & Sag 2000, Fernández & Ginzburg 2002, Schlangen 2003), which assign different internal structures that are relatively independent from each other to different types of fragments, depending on the context in which the fragment occurs. An empirical study would have to test all of these structures individually in order to determine the appropriateness of such an account.

The accounts that I investigate differ in particular with respect to two issues: First, whether fragments are underlyingly sentential, and second, whether their generation involves obligatory syntactic movement. The first question is a matter of debate between sentential and nonsentential accounts of fragments, whereas the second one is disputed between the different families of sentential accounts. A first series of experiments investigates whether fragments are underlyingly sentential or base-generated nonsentential utterances. These experiments use

### 1.2 Why do speakers use fragments?

structural case marking on DP fragments as a diagnostic for unarticulated syntactic structure. Since the experiments provide evidence for a sentential analysis of fragments, I then use potential parallelisms between fragment and movement restriction as a testing ground for obligatory movement in fragments. Taken together, the experiments support the in situ ellipsis account of fragments, which has been proposed by Reich (2007). This complements the theoretical debate on the syntax of fragments with empirically validated data and settles the ground for the investigation of the usage of fragments in the second part of this book.

## **1.2 Why do speakers use fragments?**

Generative theories of fragments determine which form fragments can take, but they do not explain why speakers use fragments at all, and under which circumstances they prefer a fragment over a complete sentence. Corpus data show that fragments are relatively frequent, and, the frequent usage of fragments3 suggests that speakers have a reason to prefer them over full sentences in particular situations. However, except for a game-theoretic approach with very restricted scope by Bergen & Goodman (2015), the question of what determines this preference is totally unexplored.

The second part of this book (Chapters 4 and 5) is dedicated to the investigation of why and when speakers use fragments. An answer to this question requires establishing (i) why the usage of a fragments or a sentence is sometimes (dis)advantageous, and (ii) why *specific* words are preferably omitted in fragments. For instance, in the case of the pizza example in (1), the speaker might have said *Another slice of pizza* instead, so the choice between competing fragments must be modeled too. At this point, the investigation of the usage of fragments draws on the findings on the syntax of fragments in the first part of the book, since the set of *possible* fragments is necessarily restricted to those which can be derived by syntax.

The account that I propose assumes that the information-theoretic processing principle of Uniform Information Density (UID, Levy & Jaeger 2007) plays a crucial role in the choice of an utterance by the speaker. Two experiments confirm the central predictions of this account: Speakers choose the utterance that makes the most efficient usage of the hearer's processing resources, and they consequently omit words that underutilize these resources but realize words that prevent them from being exceeded. In addition to providing evidence for the

3 For instance, Fernández & Ginzburg (2002) find in a corpus study that 11.15% of the utterances in a subcorpus of the British National Corpus (Burnard 2000) are fragments.

### 1 Introduction

information-theoretic account of the usage of fragments, these findings have implications both for the research on ellipsis and for the investigation of the choice between alternative utterances in general. The choice between a reduced (elliptical) form and a complete one is also highly relevant to other ellipsis phenomena like sluicing, gapping and verb phrase ellipsis, and it might be instructive to test whether the conclusions on the usage of fragments apply to these ellipses as well. From a broader psycholinguistic perspective, my results contribute to the growing bulk of evidence for effects of information-theoretic processing constraints, and specifically for UID, on the preferred form of utterances. This supports several implications of UID, such as the close link between predictability and processing effort, the assumption of audience design and the parallel and incremental nature of the human parser.

## **1.3 Chapter overview**

1.4 Defining the notion*fragment*

## **1.4 Defining the notion** *fragment*

In the literature on fragments, there is no mutually shared definition of the phenomenon and there is disagreement specifically with respect to which utterances are classified as fragments. This section delimits how the notion *fragment* is used in this book and distinguishes it from other instances of reduced utterances. In order to distinguish fragments from other omission phenomena and instances of apparently incomplete speech, I rely on three criteria: (i) the performance of a speech act (Morgan 1973), (ii) the absence of a finite verb, and (iii) the absence of a linguistic antecedent within the same utterance. First, a fragment must be used to perform a speech act. This excludes labels (Klein 1993) like (2).

(2) Skim milk / 16 oz. / sugar free …

Second, the distinction between fragments and sentences is based on the subsentential character of fragments. What counts as "subsentential" depends on the syntactic analysis of the expression in question. For instance, in sentences with null pronouns in argument positions like (3), where a subject has been omitted, the remainder of the sentence is preserved, whereas in the DP fragment in (1a) there is no immediate evidence for any structure above the DP level.

(3) Will be back soon.

Therefore, the most uncontroversial examples of fragments are XPs that are not of the same category as full sentences, which is most easily evidenced by the absence of an inflected verb. For instance, if English sentences are TPs, the bare DP *another slice* in (1a) must be categorized as a fragment based on this criterion. The same holds for any category below TP, like VP, PP or NP. Consequently, utterances like (3) are not categorized as fragments even though they lack an otherwise obligatory argument, because the auxiliary still evidences that the utterance is a TP. Note that this does not imply that fragments do not ever *contain* TPs but only that they *are* not TPs themselves. The complement clause in (4a) hence counts as a fragment, because in a full sentence it needs to be embedded under a matrix verb (4b) that is missing here.

	- b. John said that he'll be back soon.

Third, unlike antecedent-based ellipses (Reich 2011), such as gapping, sluicing, sprouting, and verb phrase ellipsis, fragments do not require an explicit linguistic antecedent. There is some disagreement in the literature about whether this

### 1 Introduction

condition excludes short answer fragments, too. For instance, Klein (1993) distinguishes discourse-initial fragments from what he calls *adjacency pairs*. According to Klein (1993: 768), ellipses in adjacency pairs "require an explicit linguistic context, […] on which the elliptical utterance depends [translation from German, R.L.]." This definition of adjacency pairs clearly includes short answers as (5). The distinction between short answers and discourse-initial fragments is explicitly made in Reich (2011). In contrast, all of the researchers whose theories I discuss in Chapter 2 rely on data from short answers in support of their theories of fragments. This suggests that they adopt, at least implicitly, a uniform analysis of short answers and discourse-initial fragments.

(5) What did John eat? Pizza.

Even though the status of short answers is theoretically controversial, some of the experiments presented in this book investigate short answers, particularly in the extensions of the experiments by Merchant et al. (2013), who also used short answers in their studies. In experiments 1–3 on default case marking as well as in experiments 11 and 12, which investigate the usage of fragments, I use discourse-initial fragments instead. As for the question of whether there is a categorical distinction between adjacency pairs and genuine fragments, from the probabilistic perspective that my information-theoretic account implies, it seems compelling to attribute potential differences between short answers and discourse-initial fragments to differences in predictability: Material that has been mentioned in an explicit preceding question will be much more predictable than when it must be inferred from extralinguistic context, and the use of fragments will be therefore more strongly preferred. However, testing this experimentally will be complicated due to the necessary correlation between predictability and the type of context. Therefore, I remain agnostic to the question on whether there is a categorical difference between short answers and discourse-initial fragments. Except for the studies that replicate or follow up on previous experiments involving short answers, I rely on discourse-initial fragments, which are the most uncontroversial instances of fragments.

# **2 Theories of fragments**

Since Morgan (1973) introduced the notion of *fragment* and first described the phenomenon, there has been considerable debate and disagreement on the syntax of these expressions. In the first part of this book (Chapters 2 and 3), I therefore discuss and experimentally investigate aspects of the syntax of fragments on which competing theories disagree and which will allow us to test the validity of the theories' predictions. Besides contributing to our theoretical understanding of fragments, the experiments lay the ground for the experiments on their usage in the second part of this work.

This chapter summarizes some representative versions of the most influential generative theories of fragments. Among these, two families of syntactic accounts are to be distinguished. On the one hand, *nonsentential accounts* (Section 2.1) treat fragments as truly nonsentential expressions that lack any sort of unarticulated structure. This requires some modification of syntactic theory in order to allow for well-formed subsentential output (see e.g. Barton & Progovac 2005, Fortin 2007). On the other hand, *sentential accounts* (Section 2.2) claim that fragments are derived by ellipsis from linguistically complete sentences. There are two versions of sentential accounts: the *in situ deletion* account (Reich 2007), which derives fragments from regular sentences, and the *movement and deletion* account (Merchant 2004a), which states that the future fragment has to occupy a left-peripheral position in the full sentence before ellipsis applies. Finally, in Section 2.3 I discuss the claim by Bergen & Goodman (2015) that fragments are actually *ungrammatical*, but that speakers can still use them if they manage to get their message across. The experiments presented in this book do not explicitly address the predictions of theories of fragments in other syntactic frameworks, like HPSG (Ginzburg & Sag 2000, Fernández & Ginzburg 2002, Schlangen 2003). Since these accounts assume relatively complex structures for individual types of fragments, which model connectivity effects and other properties, it is difficult to falsify them empirically and compare their predictions to generative accounts that derive fragments by more abstract and general principles. Nonetheless, in the discussion of the results I address issues that are relevant to the empirical predictions of HPSG accounts.

### 2 Theories of fragments

This chapter is structured as follows: In Sections 2.1–2.3, I present the central ideas of these theories and avoid controversial or conflicting evidence as much as possible. Section 2.4 discusses a series of phenomena that have been argued by the respective authors to constitute evidence for or against specific accounts. As will become clear, most of the theories explain most of the data, but there are some aspects on which they disagree and which will serve as a testing ground for the competing theories in experiments 1–10.

With the exception of Bergen & Goodman (2015), all of the accounts presented here have been developed by authors working in a Chomskyan generative framework. Therefore, they focus on explaining why we observe specific restrictions on the form of fragments, but neglect their processing and psychological reality. This might raise the question of whether modeling the syntactic derivation is relevant at all to the processing and interpretation of fragments by the hearer. For instance, from the hearer's perspective, it might seem irrelevant whether the speaker had a linguistic structure in mind, which is only partially articulated, or there was nothing but a fragment to begin with: The fragment she1 has to interpret is identical in both cases. However, there are at least two good reasons to take the derivations proposed by the different theories of fragments seriously. First, if fragments are generated by grammatical mechanisms, knowledge about these will guide the hearer in retrieving the intended message. Second, if such grammatical mechanisms restrict the form of possible fragments, they will restrict the set of alternative encodings of a proposition to those fragments which are a well-formed output of grammar.

## **2.1 Fragments as nonsententials**

According to nonsentential accounts, fragments do not contain any sort of unarticulated structure. As Stainton (2006) points out, the assumption that fragments are *genuinely* nonsentential presupposes that there is neither silent material in fragments nor that any parts of the utterance are deleted in course of the derivation. This requires some modification to standard syntax in order to allow for subsentential expressions to be a well-formed output of syntax.

Barton & Progovac (2005) sketch a theory of fragments that is based upon this idea, which is grounded in the minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995). They

1Throughout this book I use arbitrary gender pronouns in order to refer to abstract hearers and speakers. Sometimes the speaker will be female and the hearer male and vice versa, but I use the same pronoun for the same imaginary person in a situation.

### 2.1 Fragments as nonsententials

propose two adjustments of the theory in order to allow for syntactically wellformed subsentential objects. First, any maximal projection XP can be a wellformed output of grammar, and second, case checking requirements are relaxed in fragments. Besides bare XP fragments, their theory is designed to explain other omissions found in the ETP corpus (Libben & Tesak 1994), a corpus of elicited 'telegraphese' data. As discussed by Barton (1998), this register is characterized by frequent omissions of functional elements like articles, first person subject pronouns and auxiliary verbs.

The first modification to standard syntax that Barton & Progovac (2005) propose is that the derivation can stop at any maximal projection, as long as it is internally well-formed and there are no lexical items left in the numeration. The fragment in (1) is consequently analyzed as a bare VP that does not contain a TP. Barton & Progovac (2005) argue that there is no evidence for a T head in the derivation, because the verb *play* is not inflected for person or tense.

(1) What does John do all summer? (Barton & Progovac 2005: 81) Play baseball.

The second modification that Barton & Progovac propose is the Case Feature Corollary (CFC) (2). In minimalism, case-marked DPs are assumed to have uninterpretable case features, which must be checked in a specific syntactic configuration by a head carrying the same feature (3). The CFC loosens this requirement for fragments (2), but not for full sentences.

(2) Case Feature Corollary (CFC) (Barton & Progovac 2005: 78) Nonsententials differ from sententials in one property: they are not required to check Case features.

Barton & Progovac (2005) motivate the CFC with the observation of differing case-marking preferences between fragments and sentences. For instance, English pronominal short answers (4a,b) seem to be more acceptable in accusative case than in nominative. In full sentences (4c,d) the pattern is inverted, even though the pronoun has the same grammatical function in both cases.

### 2 Theories of fragments

(4) Who can eat another piece of cake? (Barton & Progovac 2005: 77)

Barton & Progovac argue that this follows from the default case status of the English accusative, while nominative is considered structural case. In this line of reasoning, structural case is assigned in specific syntactic configurations and does not contribute to semantics, unlike inherent case, which encodes specific a θ-role. In the case of English, nominative is checked by a T head. Barton & Progovac (2005) interpret the data in (4) as evidence nominative in fragments is ungrammatical because of the absence of a covert T head, which would check nominative case features. In contrast, accusative is acceptable in fragments according to Barton & Progovac (2005: 78), because it is the default case in English, i.e. the most unmarked form. They argue that the use of accusative in predicative DPs (5) evidences this, because nominative is assigned only to the specifier of TP.

(5) a. This is me/him/us. (Barton & Progovac 2005: 79) b. ?This is I/he/we.

As the predictions of Barton & Progovac's account crucially rely on the concept of default case, this notion requires some further attention. First of all, it is controversial whether default case exists at all. In minimalism, case is modeled by the assumption of specific features and it has been assumed since Chomsky's (1981) *case filter* that derivations converge only if all DPs are case-marked. However, even Merchant (2004b), who argues against default case, assumes that resumptive pronouns like *who* in his example (6) are base-generated in a left-peripheral position and that they cannot undergo the regular case checking mechanisms.

(6) Whoi do you think that if the voters elect himi , the country will go to ruin.

Schütze (2001) argues that default case *can* be integrated into a minimalist framework if it is defined as a residual category of case-marking that is assigned only to those DPs which are not marked with a more specific case.2 Default case simply

2 Schütze adopts concepts from Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), in particular, the idea of *late insertion* of lexical items into the derivation in a postsyntactic spell-out module. Schütze proposes that only arguments receive uninterpretable case features before entering the numeration, which are different from the optional morphological case features that determine which case marking a DP receives when it is selected during late insertion (Schütze 2001: 230– 231). Non-arguments do not require syntactic case marking at all.

### 2.1 Fragments as nonsententials

appears whenever no other case marking is available. According to Schütze, this becomes evident when the DP appears in a position where no syntactic relation to expressions that check case can be established, such as hanging topics (7a) or predicative constructions (7b).

Since default case has the status of a residual category in Schütze's theory, he predicts considerable crosslinguistic variation both with respect to the contexts where it occurs and to the form that default case takes. First, languages can differ in whether a case checking relation is established in a specific syntactic position, so that the distribution of default case can differ crosslinguistically. With respect to the form, crosslinguistic equivalents of (7) suggest that in some languages, such as English, Irish and Norwegian, accusative is default case, whereas it is nominative in German, Russian or Dutch (Schütze 2001: 229). Progovac (2006: 51) argues that it is also nominative in Serbian (8).

(8) Ona/\*Nju she.nom/her predsednik president kluba?! club.gen (Vi you se refl šalite.) kid 'Her president of the club?! (You must be kidding!)' (Progovac 2006: 51)

Therefore, the nonsentential account makes different predictions on the case marking of DP fragments in examples such as (4) depending on which case is the default case in a language. The German version of the question-answer pair (4), which is given in (9), is in line with this prediction.3 Note that this example does not contradict sentential accounts, which interpret (9) as evidence *for* an unarticulated T head checking nominative in fragments. I return to this issue in Section 2.4.1.

(9) Wer who kann can noch more ein one Stück piece Kuchen cake essen? eat 'Who can eat another piece of cake?'

3 It shall be noted that Schütze (2001: 221) also notes that subject DP fragments like (4) receive accusative case marking in English, but nominative in German. However, unlike Barton & Progovac (2005) and Progovac (2006), Schütze does not simply explain this by the different default case in both languages but argues that DP fragments are only a "possible default-case environment" (Schütze 2001: 229): He argues that it is an "actual" one in English, but not in German, which uses the "strategy" of always matching case in question and answer.

### 2 Theories of fragments

The discussion on case checking in fragments in Barton & Progovac (2005) focuses on the distinction between structural and default case, but does not explicitly discuss fragments appearing in inherent case, such as dative or genitive. Progovac et al. (2006: 338–341) argue that in Serbian non-nominative case is inherent case, because it is associated with a specific θ-role. For instance, "dative objects are typically associated with the theta-role of goal/recipient" (Progovac et al. 2006: 339), so that dative has interpretable case features which do not need to be checked at all. Consequently, the nonsentential account predicts inherent case-marked fragments to be acceptable in an appropriate context and restricts anticonnectivity effects as in (4) to instances where DPs receive structural case marking in complete sentences.

As a syntactic theory, Barton & Progovac's (2005) nonsentential account is primarily concerned with deriving the fragments that are grammatical in a language. The theory does not explain how fragments are licensed or how they are interpreted. As for licensing, Barton & Progovac (2005: 89) suggest that recoverable expressions can be omitted, be it from linguistic or extralinguistic context. With respect to their interpretation, nonsentential accounts assume that this requires pragmatic enrichment. Stainton (2006) sketches a mechanism for this, which assumes that a salient nonlinguistic conceptual object4 is used to enrich the fragment to a complete proposition. The crucial difference between sentential and nonsentential theories of fragments is therefore whether the contextually salient objects licensing fragments are linguistic or only conceptual. Reflexes of linguistic structure, like structural case marking or movement restrictions, which are not contained in nonlinguistic representations, will be crucial for differentiating between both families of theories.

## **2.2 Fragments as elliptical sentences**

Sentential accounts are motivated by the observation that fragments can be used for the same communicative purposes as full sentences despite their reduced form. For instance, the fragments in (10) appear to be a bare PP (10a) or DP (10b), but in both cases they are used to perform speech acts, just like their fully sentential counterparts in (11). If sentence mood is encoded in the left periphery (see e.g. Rizzi 1997), this possibility of performing speech acts with fragments seems surprising, as there is no direct evidence for a left periphery in these utterances.

4 Stainton (2006: 186–189) terms it "logical form", but explicitly delimits his use of this term from that referring to the semantic representation of an utterance. Stainton refers to some kind of conceptual nonlinguistic representation instead.

2.2 Fragments as elliptical sentences

Since Morgan (1973), one explanation for this apparent mismatch between form and function has been that fragments do not really lack these projections, but that they are actually full sentences, parts of which are deleted by ellipsis.5 This analysis has the advantage that, beyond mechanisms for licensing ellipsis (which are needed anyway in order to explain other instances of ellipsis), no amendments to syntactic theory are required in order to derive fragments. Their semantics can also be calculated compositionally as in regular sentences. Besides those theoretical advantages of sentential accounts, they are empirically supported by *connectivity effects*, morphosyntactically and semantically identical behavior of a constituent as a fragment and within a full sentence. Such effects concern, for example, case marking (see Section 2.4.1) and binding (Merchant 2004a).

Advocates of a sentential account do not agree on what exactly the underlying structure looks like, specifically on whether fragments involve an obligatory movement step, as suggested by Merchant (2004a) or not, as Reich (2007) argues. In what follows, I present the central ideas of each of these two approaches.

### **2.2.1 In situ deletion**

The most straightforward version of a sentential account derives fragments from regular sentences using those ellipsis mechanisms that are needed anyway to account for other types of ellipsis, such as gapping or sluicing. Reich (2007) presents such an account.6 In a nutshell, he argues that all those parts of the utterance which are not focused are elided, and that the distribution of focus is determined by the relevant Question under Discussion (QuD, Roberts 1996), which can be either implicit or explicit.

The restriction of ellipsis to non-focused expressions follows from *questionanswer congruence*, the licensing condition that Reich (2007) imposes on ellipsis. Reich (2007) assumes a question-based discourse structure (following Roberts

5This "deletion" is assumed to occur only on the phonological form (PF) that determines the acoustic realization of the sentences, but not on the logical form (LF) that determines their meaning in the terminology of Chomsky (1981).

6Reich's theory is specifically motivated by a set of similarities between short answers and gapping. I restrict the presentation of this account to fragments.

### 2 Theories of fragments

1996), so that the information structure of a sentence is determined by the immediately preceding QuD. The QuD can be either explicit or implicit. In Reich's examples of fragments it is explicit, because he discusses short answers and not discourse-initial fragments. However, his theory can account for discourseinitial fragments in the same way, since one of his main goals is a uniform analysis of fragments and gapping, where ellipsis is licensed by an implicit QuD.

Reich (2007) resorts to Rooth's (1992) theory of question-answer congruence in order to formally define the relationship between question and answer. Following Rooth (1992), Reich assumes that the meaning of a question is equivalent to the set of its potential answers, which can be obtained by replacing the *wh*phrase by an existentially bound variable. For an answer to be well-formed, it must obey the two constraints in (12): First, C-Answer (12a) determines that the answer A must be included in the denotation of Q (Reich 2007: 472). Second, F-Answer determines that the answer's focus value, which, following Rooth (1992), is calculated by replacing focused expressions with existentially bound variables, must be a superset of the denotation of the question (Reich 2007: 472).

(12) a. C-Answer: [[A]] ∈ [[Q]]. b. F-Answer: [[Q]] ⊆ [[A]]F (and |[[Q]] ∩ [[A]]F | ≥ 2)

Reich shows how these constraints explain in interaction why (14a), but not (14b) or (14c) are information-structurally well-formed answers to (13).

Reich (2007: 472) defines the focus values for (14a) and (14b) as (15). The focus value of (14a) in (15a) entails the denotation of the question (13b) and thus conforms to F-Answer. Since the answer is included in the denotation of the question (provided that Sue is a student), C-Answer is also respected. In the case of (14b), its focus value in (15b) does not entail (13b), therefore the answer is not congruent. The focus value of (14c) does entail (13b), but C-Answer is violated, because *Noam Chomsky* is not contained in the set of students so that (14c) is not included in the set of possible answers.

$$\begin{array}{rcl} \text{(15)} & \text{a.} & [[[(14\text{a})]]]\_{\text{F}} = \{\text{p}; \exists \text{x} [\text{x} \in \text{D}\_{\text{c}} \text{ } \& \text{p} = \text{that John invested x}]\} \\ \text{b.} & [[[(14\text{b})]]]\_{\text{F}} = \{\text{p}; \exists \text{x} [\text{x} \in \text{D}\_{\text{c}} \text{ } \& \text{p} = \text{that x} \text{ invited John}]\} \end{array}$$

### 2.2 Fragments as elliptical sentences

Syntactically, Reich (2007: 472) links the question to the answer by assuming a squiggle operator ∼, which adjoins to the highest node of the syntax tree of the answer, the CP. The operator introduces a variable Γ, which is coindexed with the question (16). The operator presupposes that the answer is congruent to the question with respect to the two constraints in (12a) discussed above. This notion of question-answer congruence is the licensing condition for ellipsis.7

(16) a. [Which professor did John invite *t* ?]1 (Reich 2007: 472) b. [John invited [Noam Chomsky]F ] ∼ Γ1 .

Reich (2007) defines ellipsis as PF-deletion, which can target only non-focused constituents, because the F-mark on focused ones requires them to receive a pitch accent (Selkirk 1984).8 Defining ellipsis as a post-spellout phenomenon, which applies to PF only, explains why it has no effects on LF. Technically, Reich proposes that PF-deletion proceeds top-down starting at the sister node of Γ (CP, the root node of the answer) according to the rules in (17).

(17) PF-deletion (Reich 2007: 473)

Taking the sentential answer (16b) as a starting point, the application of these PF-deletion rules yields the fragment in (18a) as the only acceptable outcome of the operation. Preserving larger parts of the structure, e.g. (18b), is ruled out by the need to maximize PF-deletion spelled out in (17b). Reich suggests that this second clause of the rule is specific to short answers and gapping, whereas (17a) applies to all types of ellipses.

(i) Who did Peter invite? (Ott & Struckmeier 2016: 227–228)

7 See Reich (2007: 474–477) for a comparison to Merchant's (2001) notion of e-givenness.

8Ott & Struckmeier (2016) sketch a very similar account but argue that it is the background of the utterance that can be deleted rather than the focus that cannot. They argue that this accounts better for the ability of German modal particles (MPs) to survive ellipsis (i), because MPs do not encode propositional meaning but the attitude of the speaker. According to Ott & Struckmeier, MPs neither belong to the focus nor to the background, so that the PF-deletion rules in Reich (2007) predict them to be omitted, while their own account does not.

### 2 Theories of fragments

(18) a. [Noam Chomsky]F . b. \*Invited [Noam Chomsky]F

The theory by Reich (2007) makes a series of testable predictions on the form of fragments. First, just like other sentential accounts, it predicts fragments to exhibit connectivity effects due to the unarticulated syntactic structure which they contain. Second, linguistic context, and specifically the relevant QuD, should have a strong effect on the form of fragments, because ellipsis is licensed only if the answer is congruent to the question. This is specifically expected when the QuD is explicit, as it is in question-answer sequences or other adjacency pairs. Implicit QuDs must be inferred by the hearer, who will try to accommodate a QuD that is congruent to the fragment. If the speaker is cooperative, such a QuD will always be accessible, because otherwise the speaker would prefer to utter a full sentence. Third, the form of fragments will also be constrained by focus projection rules, because only F-marked constituents survive ellipsis and the background is PF-deleted. Language-specific differences with respect to these rules will be reflected in different possible forms of fragments. Finally, Reich (2007) allows for discontinuous non-constituent fragments. This contrasts with most of the other accounts of fragments discussed in this section, which require fragments to be a single constituent. If multiple independent constituents are F-marked in a specific context, e.g. in case of multiple *wh*-questions (19), all of them must survive ellipsis.

.

(19) [Waiter serving a couple their food:] Who ordered what? Customer: She ordered the pizza.

### **2.2.2 Movement and deletion**

While Reich (2007) develops a unified account of fragments and gapping, Merchant (2004a) observes a set of similarities between fragments and sluicing. This motivates the extension of his theory of sluicing (Merchant 2001), which derives sluices by regular *wh*-movement followed by ellipsis of the remnant, to fragments. The central claim of the account is that all fragments undergo movement to a left-peripheral position before ellipsis applies to the remnant.

According to Merchant (2004a), ellipsis is triggered by a specific syntactic item, the E feature. Merchant argues that there are different varieties of E, each of which is related to a specific type of ellipsis, such as sluicing (Merchant 2001), fragments (Merchant 2004a) and VP ellipsis (Merchant 2013). Each variety of E has its own lexicon entry, which encodes its syntactic, phonologic and semantic

### 2.2 Fragments as elliptical sentences

properties. To illustrate the idea, the derivation that Merchant assumes for the sluice in (20) is given in Figure 2.1. 9

(20) Abby was reading something, but I don't know what ⟨Abby was reading *t*⟩. (Merchant 2004a: 670)

Figure 2.1: Derivation of the sluice in (20) according to Merchant (2004a: 670).

E is always located on the head of a functional projection, like CP in Figure 2.1. The syntactic properties of E, which consist of a set of uninterpretable features, determine which head can host the feature. For instance, ES , the E feature found in sluicing, has the features [*u*wh\*, *u*Q\*] (Merchant 2004a: 670). This ensures that it can be hosted only by heads that are [wh,Q] and that therefore can check these features, such as C in interrogatives. The variants of E found in other types of ellipsis may have different feature specifications and are thereby restricted to other functional heads. Merchant (2004a: 671) suggests that the varieties of E are identical with respect to their phonology and semantics and differ only in these syntactic specifications. The phonological effect of the E feature is that the complement of the head it is located on remains unarticulated at PF. In (20), this concerns the complete TP of the second conjunct in (20). Both sentential accounts discussed so far, Merchant (2004a) and Reich (2007), agree that no syntactic structure is deleted during the derivation. Even though parts of it are unarticulated

9Merchant (2004a: 671) notes that the assumption of independent lexical entries for the specific varieties of E also accounts for crosslinguistic variation. For instance, he argues that German has no VP ellipsis because this language lacks the corresponding variety of E, while it shares with English the varieties found in fragments and sluicing.

### 2 Theories of fragments

at PF, the unarticulated words are still present on LF. In (20), this results in the wh-phrase being the only articulated word in the sluice, because it leaves the ellipsis site through *wh*-movement to [Spec, CP].

According to Merchant (2004a), the licensing condition on omissions in fragments is *e-givenness*, which is included in the semantics of the E feature (21): E requires the complement of the head hosting E to be e-given. E-givenness is the identity condition licensing ellipsis in Merchant's theory and consists basically in a bidirectional givenness relation in the sense of Schwarzschild (1999). An expression E counts as e-given when it has a salient antecedent A which entails the existential closure of the focus value of A and vice versa.

(21) [[E]] = p: e-given (p) [p] (Merchant 2004a: 672)

The requirement for the complement of the head hosting E to be e-given ensures that ellipsis is licensed only if there is a structurally parallel antecedent available in context, and that it is blocked if there remains a constituent within the complement that is not e-given. (22) exemplifies the mechanism for the sluicing example in (20): The antecedent has the focus structure in (22a), whose existential closure (22b) is entailed by the sluice (22c). As the existential closure of (22c) is identical to the one of the antecedent in (22b), the opposite relation also holds, so that the ellipsis in (20) is licensed by e-givenness.

	- b. ∃x. Abby was reading x
	- c. Abby was reading [what]F .

Merchant (2004a) extends this analysis to fragments. His theory accounts for discourse-initial fragments (see below for details), but he focuses mostly on short answer fragments like (23), for which he assumes the structure in Figure 2.2. Again, the E feature is hosted by C in the left periphery, while the fragment is moved to the specifier of a functional projection FP immediately above CP. This movement operation proceeds cyclically through [Spec, CP].

The major difference between sluicing and fragments is that EF , the variety of E found in fragments, and ES have different syntactic features, which are [*u*C\*, *u*F] for EF and [*u*wh\*, *u*Q\*] for ES . The strong *u*C\* feature ensures that E is located on a C head, while the weak *u*F feature can be checked under Agree (Merchant 2004a: 707), because weak features don't need to be checked locally according to

### 2.2 Fragments as elliptical sentences

Figure 2.2: Derivation of the fragment answer in (23b) according to Merchant (2004a).

the theory. Otherwise, the derivation is identical to sluicing: After the fragment has been moved, ellipsis applies to the TP.

With respect to the landing site of the fragment in [Spec, FP], Merchant avoids committing himself to an analysis of what kind of projection FP is. However, Merchant (2004a: 675) tentatively suggests that it is a focus projection in the sense of Rizzi (1997). 10,11 Whether or not FP is a focus projection is highly relevant to the theory, because this would provide an explanation for why movement in fragments would occur at all. Since Merchant's theory is embedded in a minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995), movement cannot be optional, but is a *last resort* operation that is mostly driven by the need to check strong features in a local (specifier-head) configuration. In Merchant's (2001) account of sluicing, the *wh*-phrase reaches [Spec, CP] through *wh*-movement, which is driven by uninterpretable features of the *wh*-phrase. Similarly, movement in fragments requires a trigger which the E feature cannot provide: Its syntax, as defined above, contains

10Elsewhere (Merchant 2004a: 703) he relates the movement operation that results in fragments to Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD, Cinque 1990) rather than to focus. See Section 2.4.3 for a discussion.

11The idea that FP is a focus projection is further developed by Gengel (2007), who argues explicitly that movement in fragments occurs to check a [+contrastive] feature in [Spec, FP]. This conclusion might be too strong, since in languages like German or English fronting foci is possible yet marked. Specifically, as Weir (2014a) notes and I discuss in greater detail below, object DP fragments are acceptable in situations where fronting objects is definitely not.

### 2 Theories of fragments

only uninterpretable features that determine on which head it can appear. If FP was related to an information-structural concept such as focus or topic, an uninterpretable feature related to this notion could trigger movement in fragments independently from E, just like Merchant (2001) argues for sluicing.

From an empirical perspective, Merchant (2004a) requires evidence that fragments have actually moved. Since he analyzes movement in fragments as regular A'-movement, his theory predicts that the derivation of fragments is subject to movement restrictions that are observed in full sentences: Only those constituents that can be moved to [Spec, FP] and appear in a left-peripheral position in full sentences are predicted to be possible fragments. Merchant (2004a) presents introspective data from different phenomena and languages in support of this prediction, some of which will provide the testing ground for his theory in my experiments.12

However, Weir (2014a) shows that the assumption that structures presumably underlying movement and deletion are acceptable across the board is falsified even by simple examples such as (24). The short answer fragment in (24a) is fine despite the ungrammaticality of the presumably underlying fronting structure (24b). The acceptability of left dislocation in a sentence seems not to be necessarily related to the acceptability of the corresponding fragment.

(24) What did you eat? (Weir 2014a: 168)

a. Chips.

b. \*Chips, I ate *t*.

In order to account for such data while maintaining the idea of movement and deletion, Weir (2014a) claims that movement in fragments is a special type of movement which is restricted to elliptical utterances and which differs from movement in narrow syntax, i.e. before spell out. According to Weir, this *exceptional* movement is triggered by a clash between the prosodic properties of focused expressions, which are marked with a pitch accent, and the ellipsis site, which the E feature requires to be silent. As Weir (2014a) assumes a similar underlying structure as Merchant (2004a) does (see Figure 2.2), that is, a regular sentence whose C head hosts the E feature, the TP is marked for PF-deletion, but still contains the focused DP *John*. This conflict is solved by moving the focused expression(s) out of the ellipsis site and adjoining them to CP.

Exceptional movement differs from narrow syntactic movement. First, it is not driven by feature checking; in fact, Weir (2014a: 195) denies that there is a focus

12See Section 2.4.4 for details.

### 2.2 Fragments as elliptical sentences

feature in English.13 According to Weir, exceptional movement is nevertheless a last resort operation, because there is no other way of saving the derivation from crashing due to the clash between focus and ellipsis at PF. Second, exceptional movement has no effect on the semantics of the utterance. This is in line with the observation that, unlike Gengel (2007) suggests, fragments are not necessarily contrastive. Weir (2014a: 183) attributes the absence of semantic effects of exceptional movement to its application after spell-out and at PF only. He argues that this also explains why it is restricted to elliptical utterances: The only purpose of exceptional movement is to evacuate focused constituents from the ellipsis site, and because focused constituents can remain in situ in full sentences, exceptional movement is ruled out by economy considerations.

As the discussion in Section 2.4.4 will show, the assumption of exceptional movement notably complicates the empirical evaluation of the movement and deletion account, because the strong correlation between the acceptability of fronting and fragments is no longer predicted. Therefore, the experiments presented below test Merchant's (2004a) version of the theory in the first place, but I also discuss the relevance for the exceptional movement theory whenever its predictions differ from Merchant (2004a).

### **2.2.3 Discourse-initial fragments under sentential accounts**

Up to this point, the theoretical discussion has focused mostly on short answer fragments, although I argued in the introduction that the most uncontroversial instances of fragments are discourse-initial ones. Discourse-initial fragments challenge any sentential account of fragments: Given the licensing conditions of ellipsis discussed so far, ellipsis requires an antecedent, and in examples such as (25) no such antecedent seems to be available. Nonsentential accounts do not face this problem, as they derive the propositional meaning of fragments by pragmatic inference. Since some of the experiments presented in this work rely on discourse-initial fragments, in what follows I discuss how sentential accounts can account for these utterances and some of their properties. In particular, I argue

13Focus fronting is still acceptable in English if the focus is contrastive in the sense of Krifka (2007), i.e., when alternatives to the focused expression are given in context (i).

(i) *Him* I invited, not *her*.

This could still be accounted for by a more specific feature that appears only in contrastive contexts. However, even in cases as (i), focus fronting does not seem to be obligatory, therefore the English data require closer investigation, specifically if movement is to be assumed as nonoptional (provided the relevant features are present).

### 2 Theories of fragments

that in those situations where discourse-initial fragments are used, an antecedent that licenses ellipsis can be retrieved from extralinguistic context. This facilitates a unified sentential account of fragments with and without overt antecedents.

	- b. [Customer to barista:] A coffee, please!
	- c. [Taking a postcard out of the post box:] From John!

Sentential accounts that assume a QuD-based model of context (Reich 2007, Weir 2014a) can explain the utterances in (25) by assuming implicit QuDs, which are evoked by the extralinguistic context and which are appropriate antecedents (26). For instance, a pedestrian approaching a taxi is likely to ask for a ride and a guest in the coffee shop is very likely to order a drink or some food.

	- b. ⟨What would you like to have?⟩ I'd like to have a coffee, please!

Reich (2011: 1852) notes that such discourse-initial fragments are *indeterminate*, that is, there are several possible paraphrases of the missing material. For instance, the answer in (25a) could be understood as *Take me to the university!*, *I'd like to go to the university.* or *Drive to the university!*. Reich takes this to be a defining feature of what he calls situation-based ellipsis (*s-ellipsis*), for the resolution of which the hearer must resort to extralinguistic context. In contrast, antecedentbased *a-ellipses*, which have a linguistic antecedent (e.g. gapping, right node raising and VPE), can be unambiguously resolved (27).

(27) John goes to the university and Mary goes to the pub.

According to Reich (2011: 1852), indeterminacy suggests that, unlike short answers, discourse-initial fragments are syntactically genuine nonsententials. This implies a non-uniform analysis to fragments: If they have a linguistic antecedent, like an explicit QuD in the case of short answers, they are elliptical, and if they do not, they are nonsentential. However, in Reich (2007), he notes that also in antecedent-based ellipsis like gapping, the focus structure of the second conjunct can vary. If there is wide focus on the first conjunct, different focus structures (28) and henceforth different omission patterns (29) are possible in the second conjunct depending on which implicit QuD is assumed.

	- b. [John gave a book to *Sue*]F , and [*Peter*]F gave a book [to *Ann*]F .

(Reich 2007: 478)

2.2 Fragments as elliptical sentences

(29) a. [John gave a book to *Sue*]F , and [a *baseball*]F [to *Bill*]F b. [John gave a book to *Sue*]F , and [*Peter*]F [to *Ann*]F .

(Reich 2007: 478)

.

Reich (2007: 477) argues that in such cases, "a complete set of possible QuDs […] is reconstructed, from which the speaker chooses exactly one as the most salient." The hearer then has to figure out which QuD out of this set is the one that the speaker had in mind. Besides extralinguistic context, a strong cue toward the QuD intended by the speaker is the form of the utterance: If only focused expressions survive gapping, (29a) will accommodate a QuD as *What did John give to whom?* and (29b) *Who gave a book to whom?*. This reasoning applies equally to fragments: If the hearer must infer which QuD the speaker had in mind from context and the form of the elliptical utterance in gapping, there is no reason to assume that she is not able to infer the QuD in case of fragments. The set of potential QuDs might often be more restricted in case of gapping than in discourse-initial fragments by the first conjunct, so that there might be a quantitative difference between the size of the set of possible QuDs reconstructed in gapping and fragments. However, there is not necessarily a categorical difference between both constructions.

Furthermore, from a psycholinguistic perspective, the theories of fragments discussed so far are production accounts. What matters primarily to them is the speaker's perspective: Ellipsis is licensed if there is a QuD in context which the speaker believes to be sufficiently salient. Since the hearer is aware of this, she knows that there must be such a contextually salient QuD as soon as she realizes that the speaker's utterance is elliptical. If the speaker is cooperative or at least has the intention to get his message across (Grice 1975, Sperber & Wilson 1995), he will only use a fragment when he believes that the QuD is relatively easy to retrieve. For instance, if there is a high risk of being misunderstood due to several equally likely competing QuDs that differ in meaning, the full sentence will be preferred. In fact, this is supported by the experiments on script knowledge in Chapter 5 of this book. Consequently, indeterminacy of the meaning of a QuD does not impede communication if fragments are used only when the QuD is relatively predictable. Even if the meaning of the QuD is retrievable, its lexicalization is not necessarily, as the set of semantically similar QuDs listed above for the taxi example showed. However, communication can succeed even if the hearer fails to recover exactly the lexicalization of the QuD that the speaker had in mind, as long as the recovered QuD causes the hearer to perform the intended action. No matter which of the paraphrases the driver chooses in order to enrich the fragment in (26a), she will still carry the passenger to the university.

### 2 Theories of fragments

The difference between implicit and explicit QuDs is furthermore specifically relevant to the hearer's perspective. If the speaker chooses to produce a fragment, he must have a particular QuD in mind, be it implicit or explicit. Consequently, from his perspective there is no categorical difference between explicit QuDs (in case of short answers) and implicit ones (in case of discourse-initial fragments). Obviously, this changes from the perspective of the hearer, who has to reconstruct the missing material, because this task is facilitated by a QuD. Still though, as I noted above, a speaker who wants to get her message across will only choose to use the fragment if the effort required for the hearer to infer the intended QuD is reasonably small. This is confirmed by my experiments 11 and 12, which show that in particular predictable, that is, easily recoverable, words are omitted.

The assumption that the resolution of ellipsis might require some degree of inference is further supported by research on relatively uncontroversial instances of antecedent-based ellipsis. For instance, both gapping and VPE allow for mismatches between the antecedent and target of ellipsis. The VPE example in (30a) requires the hearer to reconstruct an active VP *look into this problem* given a passive antecedent. Similarly, in gapping, hearers can reconstruct a plural verb given a singular antecedent (30b). Therefore, rather than being a copy-and-paste process (Frazier & Clifton 2001), the reconstruction of elided material seems to be a task that requires retrieving the omitted material from available contextual evidence and that becomes more effortful the more antecedent and target differ (Arregui et al. 2006).

	- b. They are going to Chicago, and I ⟨am going⟩ to San Francisco. (Pullum & Zwicky 1986: 755)

Taken together, a uniform analysis of discourse-initial and short answer fragments as elliptical sentences is possible. Just like fragments, some antecedentbased ellipses require inferential reasoning about the omitted material, so that the difference between short answers and discourse-initial fragments is a gradual one: In the case of short answers, the missing material is explicitly given, so that its retrieval will be easier than in discourse-initial fragments (on average). If such a uniform account explains the data equally well, it is simpler than a mixed account that distinguishes between discourse-initial fragments and short answers and consequently to be adopted unless there is evidence against it.

Unlike Reich (2007) and Weir (2014a), Merchant (2004a) does not rely on the concept of QuD, but his theory can also account for discourse-initial fragments.

### 2.2 Fragments as elliptical sentences

Since e-givenness, which licenses fragments in his theory, operates on semantic representations, fragments in principle require a salient linguistic antecedent. Merchant's account distinguishes between fragments that occur in highly conventionalized contexts like the taxi example (25a) and those which do not, like (31a). In the case of highly predictive contexts, he notes that speakers have strong expectations about what is likely to happen and to be said in such contexts. Merchant (2004a: 730–731) argues that this *script knowledge* in the sense of Schank & Abelson (1977)14 can make specific linguistic expressions manifest in the sense of relevance theory, that is, "capable […] of representing it mentally and accepting its representation as true or probably true" (Sperber & Wilson 1986: 39). Such manifest linguistic objects can then serve as antecedents and license omission if they result in parts of the utterance being e-given. For non-conventionalized cases, Merchant (2004a: 722–727) argues that context can still make entities and concepts like the letter and its origin in (31a) manifest. This licenses the ellipsis of very basic deictic expressions, as the predicate *do it* for actions and pronouns for entities in the structure in (31b) which he assumes for the fragment in (30).

	- b. From John it is.

The deictic expressions are then resolved from context, just like they are in regular sentences. Merchant (2004a: 722) argues that the assumption that the unarticulated structure in such fragments consists in the minimally required and semantically less specified expressions also accounts for the indeterminacy of discourseinitial fragments. Pronouns can be often paraphrased with various complex DPs, so that this apparent property of fragments turns out to be just a more general property of deictic expressions.

Taken together, the assumption that ellipsis can be licensed by extralinguistic context provides an empirically necessary extension of the sentential account of fragments to (apparently) discourse-initial fragments. Nonsentential accounts, which rely on pragmatic inference in any case, do not face this problem, but might resort to the same mechanisms (e.g. script knowledge and implicit QuDs) in order to explain how fragments are interpreted.

14See Section 5.1 for details on the concept of script and a discussion of its psychological effects.

### 2 Theories of fragments

## **2.3 Fragments as ungrammatical utterances**

All of the theories discussed so far agree on the assumption that fragments are grammatical objects, be it by postulating mechanisms that license and trigger ellipsis or by modifying the theory in order to allow for nonsententials to be a well-formed output of syntax. This view is challenged by Bergen & Goodman (2015), who sketch a game-theoretic account of fragment usage and argue that fragments are actually ungrammatical, but that under some circumstances they might still be the preferred means of communicating a message. In simplified terms, Bergen & Goodman argue that hearers use a repair mechanism that helps to figure out the omitted parts of the utterance in order to infer the intended meaning from fragments. Such a mechanism is needed independently of fragments in order to deal with utterances that are corrupted by e.g. acoustic noise. Hearer and speaker are mutually aware of this possibility, so that the usage of a fragment and the subsequent inference about the intended meaning is more economic than that of a full sentence if the missing parts of the utterance are relatively easy to retrieve. Since this theory is highly usage-oriented and closely related to information theory, I discuss it in greater detail in Section 4.2.2. For the time being, what matters is the presumed ungrammaticality of fragments.

Such an account predicts that there are no restrictions on the form of fragments, provided the chosen utterance is the most suitable for communicating a message in a specific context. In contrast, syntactic accounts categorically distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical fragments. Even though the acceptability of a grammatical fragment will also be determined to a large extent by context, there are grammatical principles that cannot be overridden. For instance, the movement restrictions that Merchant (2004a) presents as evidence for his theory, or the requirement for fragments to be maximal XPs according to Barton & Progovac (2005), impose restrictions on the form of fragments that are context-independent.

It is hardly possible to empirically confirm the claim that fragments are ungrammatical objects, but it can be falsified by evidence for context-independent constraints on the form of fragments. The empirical picture is mixed: On the one hand, as my experiment 6 will show, gradual differences in acceptability among ungrammatical fragments are in line with Bergen & Goodman's (2015) account. On the other hand, there are grammatical constraints that override constraints that otherwise license omissions. For instance, Lemke et al. (2017) find that the omission of articles in German newspaper headlines is subject to processing considerations that are related to those in Bergen & Goodman (2015). In standard German however, including newspaper text, article omission is restricted only

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

to very specific contexts (e.g. predicative and plural nouns). If grammaticality did not matter at all, the same amount of omissions would be expected in similar contexts across text types which are less constrained by normative pressures, like colloquial speech.

This objection concerns only the presumed ungrammaticality of fragments, but not the mechanism that Bergen & Goodman (2015) propose in order to account for the speaker's choice between a fragment and a sentence. Such a mechanism is needed in any case,15 because also when fragments are assumed to be grammatical the speaker must somehow decide on the form of the utterance. An account of this choice process is beyond the scope of generative syntactic theory, which does not attempt to model production preferences. Taken together, the main difference between the account in Bergen & Goodman (2015) and syntactic theories of fragments concerns the question of whether the set of utterances that are possible in a situation is somehow constrained by syntax or derived by arbitrary omissions.16

## **2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments**

The accounts discussed in the preceding section assume very different derivations of fragments and syntactic structures underlying them. However, all of them are designed to account in principle for the same acceptability data reported in the literature. Therefore, in order to evaluate their predictions empirically, it is necessary to isolate phenomena with respect to which these predictions differ. In this section, I present four such phenomena, which might provide a testing ground for the theories: case connectivity effects, discontinuous fragments, information-structural restrictions, and movement restrictions. As will turn out, only case connectivity and movement evidence will be useful to distinguish between the theories. With respect to constituency and focus marking, the theories either coincide for independent reasons or they do not make precise empirical predictions with respect to them at all.

### **2.4.1 (Anti)connectivity effects: Case marking**

Both those authors who defend a sentential analysis of fragments and those supporting a nonsentential account consider case connectivity effects to be an impor-

15See Section 5.5 for a more detailed sketch of such an account.

16Note that Bergen & Goodman (2015) do not discuss how this set of possible utterances is derived and present only a very simple example. Specifically, it is unclear whether they assume that fragments are genuine nonsententials or whether they take grammatical utterances as point of departure and generate the alternative by applying arbitrary ellipses to them.

### 2 Theories of fragments

tant diagnostic for the syntax of fragments. Merchant (2004a: 676–679) presents evidence for connectivity effects from a diverse sample of languages. His general observation is that DP short answers like the German example (32) receive the same case morphology as their counterparts in complete sentences: Just like the *wh*-phrase in the question, the DP in the short answer has to receive accusative case marking (32a), whereas the dative (32b) is ungrammatical. From the sententialist perspective, case connectivity provides indirect evidence for unarticulated structure: In minimalism, at least non-default case must be checked in a local syntactic configuration between the DP and another head, so the grammaticality of such a case marking indicates the presence of an unarticulated licensor. For instance, in (32a) accusative must be checked by a verb, so that the acceptability of case marking in the absence of an overt verb suggests that the structure contains that verb, but that it has been PF-deleted in the course of the derivation. This pattern is reversed in (33), where the verb in the question requires dative. In this case, a dative, but not accusative, DP fragment is acceptable.

(32) Wen who.acc sucht seeks Hans? Hans 'Who is Hans looking for?'

a. Den the.acc Lehrer. teacher b. \*Dem Lehrer.

the.dat teacher

(33) Wem who.dat folgt follows Hans? Hans 'Who does Hans follow?'

> a. Dem the.dat Lehrer. teacher

b. \*Den the.acc Lehrer. teacher

Case connectivity effects thus support unarticulated structure in fragments. In contrast, as I already noted above, anticonnectivity effects, that is, mismatching case morphology between fragments and full sentences, support nonsentential accounts. An example for anticonnectivity is the ungrammaticality of nominative DP fragments in the English example (34), although this case is required in the corresponding full sentence. Recall that Barton & Progovac (2005) explained these data with the inability of fragments to exhibit structural case morphology under the assumption that nominative is structural case in English.

(Merchant 2004a: 677)

(Merchant 2004a: 677)

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

	- b. Me/Us/Him/Her.

The introspective data reported in the literature is contradictory. Barton & Progovac's example (34) exhibits anticonnectivity, but Merchant's German examples in (32) and (33) seem to evidence case connectivity. Both sententialists and nonsententialists present explanations for at least part of the data that seems to contradict their respective theories. In what follows, I first review how the nonsentential account could account for examples like (32a) and conclude that only the sentential account explains such connectivity effects. This rests on the assumption that accusative is structural case in German. This is supported by tests that Progovac (2006) use to show that Serbian accusative is inherent case, but which yield the opposite result when they are applied to German. I then discuss how sentential accounts can deal with anticonnectivity effects as in (33).

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Nonsentential accounts and connectivity**

As discussed above, Progovac et al. (2006) distinguish between default, structural and inherent case. In contrast to structural case features, which are uninterpretable, inherent case features can and must be interpreted by semantics, because inherent case is related to a specific θ-role. The relatively uncontroversial claim that dative is inherent case by Progovac et al. (2006: 339) explains the acceptability of dative DP fragments as (33a). In contrast, fragments that appear in structural case must be ungrammatical according to the nonsentential account, because structural case features must be checked and structural case-marked DP fragments lack an appropriate verbal head under a nonsentential analysis. This prediction is challenged by the acceptability of accusative DP fragments in German (32a), under the assumption that accusative is structural case in German.

Progovac et al. (2006) however argue that accusative is not necessarily structural case in languages where nominative is the default case. They exemplify this idea for Serbian and present three arguments that attempt to show that Serbian accusative is also inherent, interpretable case. First, they note that an accusative DP "is typically in fact a theme/patient" (Progovac et al. 2006: 339) and exclude a set of other θ-roles for accusatives (agent, goal/recipient, instrument, locative). As discussed above, the association with a specific θ-role is the central criterion for categorizing a specific case as inherent case. Second, they argue that in Serbian accusative contributes to semantics and present the contrast in (35) as evidence that accusative has a universal quantificational meaning, while genitive

### 2 Theories of fragments

quantifies existentially. Finally, they state that, in contrast to English, Serbian accusative objects do not always appear adjacent to the verb. This observation is not discussed in greater detail but is probably intended to suggest that no specific syntactic configuration is required for accusative to be licensed.

(35) a. Dodaj add vodu. water.acc 'Add (all) the water.' (Progovac et al. 2006: 340) b. Dodaj add vode. water.gen 'Add (some) water.'

Whether these arguments are empirically correct for Serbian is beyond the scope of this book. However, if they applied to German as well, this could derive grammatical accusative DP fragments like (32a) under a nonsentential account and consequently undermine the status of case connectivity effects as evidence for unarticulated structure in fragments.

Nevertheless, the diagnostics used by Progovac et al. (2006) to analyze the Serbian accusative as structural case do not yield the same result for the German accusative. The θ-role argument that accusative DPs are typically themes or patients probably holds in German too. For instance, it seems reasonable to assume that a random accusative DP drawn from a corpus is more likely to be a patient than a random nominative DP is. However, it is unclear how the gradual likelihood of being a patient can be aligned with the categorical distinction between structural, inherent and default case upon which Barton & Progovac's (2005) theory relies. This probably concerns the Serbian data as well. The remaining two arguments for analyzing Serbian accusative as inherent case do not hold in German. Quantification relies on the presence of the definite article in German17 and accusative DPs still appear adjacent to the verb in the unmarked word order in German. This suggests that at least for German the analysis of accusative as structural case is correct. Consequently, if empirically confirmed,

b. Geben give.imp Sie you frischen fresh.acc Zitronensaft lemon.juice hinzu. to 'Add (some of the) fresh lemon juice.'

17This is evidenced by the German counterparts of (35) in (i). The adjective has accusative case morphology in both examples but the meaning depends on the presence of the definite article.

(i) a. Geben give.imp Sie you den the.acc frischen fresh.acc Zitronensaft lemon.juice hinzu. to 'Add (all of) the fresh lemon juice.'

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

the acceptability of the accusative DP fragments in German challenges Barton & Progovac's (2005) theory because it does indeed predict anticonnectivity effects in that case.18 Experiment 1 disconfirms this prediction.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Sentential accounts and anticonnectivity**

Anticonnectivity effects have been presented as evidence against sentential accounts, but at least some of the data can be explained by these theories. With respect to English pronominal short answers discussed above, Merchant (2004a: 700–704) reports similar data for Greek, Dutch, German and French, which, aside from cross-linguistic differences, are characterized by formal differences between the pronouns found in fragments and those in full sentences. For instance, the French data in (36) show that in fragments only the strong, tonic pronoun *moi* is acceptable (36a), whereas the clitic *me* must be used in regular sentences (36b).

However, Merchant notes that in the left periphery only those pronouns that appear in fragments are acceptable. For instance, in Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in French (37a) or hanging topic left dislocation (HTLD) in English (37b) the form of the pronoun matches the one found in short answers.

	- a. Moi/\*Me. me.strong/me.weak b. Il me/\*moi voulait.
	- he me.weak/strong wanted 'He wanted me.'

(i) a. Koga who.acc je is Ana Ana posetila? visited? 'Who did Ana visit?'

(Progovac et al. 2006: 340)

(Merchant 2004a: 701)

18Having defined Serbian accusative as inherent case, Progovac et al. (2006: 340) argue that nominative DP fragments are degraded as answers to questions asking for an accusative (i) for pragmatic reasons. They claim that the accusative short answer is preferred over the nominative one because it is more informative. This cannot explain the German data: If accusative is structural case, the only grammatical short answer is the nominative one. The glosses and the grammaticality judgement in (ib) were added by R.L. based on the text accompanying the example in Progovac et al. (2006).

b. #Vera! Vera.nom

### 2 Theories of fragments

Merchant argues that this is empirically in line with his theory, which assumes structures such as (37) to be the source of fragments. However, he is reluctant to assume HTLD as the structure underlying fragments, because, unlike fragments, this construction is insensitive to islands. Instead, he suggests that the formal restrictions on pronominal fragments are due to the fact that weak pronouns cannot be focused. Merchant (2004a) takes this as evidence for the movement component of his theory, but the observation that only pronouns which can be focused are possible fragments is perfectly in line with Reich's (2007) in situ ellipsis account: (38a) shows that the English pronoun *me* can receive a pitch accent marking narrow or contrastive focus, whereas in French, the tonic pronoun (38b) can but the clitic (38c) cannot. The deletion of all non-focused constituents under a semantic identity condition as proposed by Reich (2007) consequently yields the same pattern as movement and deletion.19,20

### (38) A: Did they elect Ann?

Taken together, the anticonnectivity effects observed by Barton & Progovac (2005) for pronominal DP short answers are explained not only by Barton & Progovac's (2005) default case hypothesis, but also by both types of sentential accounts. Case connectivity effects concerning inherent case are also expected under both sentential and nonsentential accounts.

 B: It's me who can eat another piece of cake.

19Some authors account for mismatches between sentences and fragments with respect to preposition omission by deriving fragments from clefts (see e.g. Rodrigues et al. (2009) for Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese and van Craenenbroeck (2010) for English). Under such an analysis, according to which accusative in fragments evidences a connectivity effect than an anticonnectivity effect, (4) would be derived from a structure like (i).

20The French data in (38) are also compatible with the nonsentential account. Clitics like the French *me* appear always adjacent to an inflected verb, which the nonsentential account argues to be absent in fragments. I thank Sebastian Nordhoff for pointing this out.

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

What remains disputed is the possibility of case marking on full DP fragments, which will serve as a diagnostic for unarticulated structure in my experiments. While sentential accounts predict case connectivity also for structural case, if the nonsentential account is right, DPs that receive structural case marking in full sentences appear in default case in fragments. As noted by Progovac et al. (2006), due to crosslinguistic variation, it is necessary to carefully determine whether a specific case is actually a structural case in a given language. Finally, if fragments are ungrammatical, as suggested by Bergen & Goodman (2015), no grammatical restrictions on case marking in fragments are expected. Still though, case in fragments should tend toward matching that in the corresponding sentence, because it is a strong cue toward the meaning intended by the speaker.

### **2.4.2 Constituency**

The theories presented in the previous section disagree on whether fragments must be a single constituent: The nonsentential account by Barton & Progovac (2005) as well as movement and deletion predict this, but in situ deletion and Bergen & Goodman's (2015) approach allow for non-constituent fragments.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Constituency under the nonsentential account**

Barton & Progovac (2005) argue that any maximal projection XP can be a wellformed output of syntax, therefore a fragment must always consist of a single constituent of arbitrary size and internal complexity. Sequences of constituents that do not have a unifying node cannot be derived. The examples discussed in Barton & Progovac (2005) clearly conform to this restriction. Progovac (2006) discusses more controversial examples like (39), which are harder to analyze as a single constituent, because the predicate *a bargain* does not have a verbal projection, whose specifier could host the subject.

(39) This a bargain!? (Progovac 2006: 28)

In order to account for such apparent DP-DP sequences too, which in fact are relatively frequent (Reich 2017), Progovac (2006)resorts to a small clause analysis. Small clauses (Williams 1975, Stowell 1981) are expressions that contain a subject and a predicate, but no verbal material. They can appear as root small clauses (39) or be embedded as verbal complement inside a matrix clause (40).

(40) I consider this a bargain. (Progovac 2006: 41)

### 2 Theories of fragments

Figure 2.3: DP and PP small clauses according to Progovac (2006: 39).

Progovac (2006: 61) claims that "every sentence/clause is underlyingly a small clause." The subject is merged into the specifier of a projection whose category is determined by the predicate, as the examples in Figure 2.3 illustrate.21 If the small clause analysis is correct, it enables the nonsentential account to derive XP-YP sequences as small clauses, as long as they do not contain uninterpretable features. Progovac (2006: 51) argues that the latter condition is met, because the subjects of root and embedded small clauses in English appear in accusative default case (41a), which does not need to be checked according to the nonsentential account. If the small clause serves as input to a regular inflected clause (41b) instead, the subject is selected from the lexicon with nominative case features that are checked as usual in course of the derivation by T. In the embedded (41c), case is checked through ECM by the verb (Progovac 2006: 46).

(41) a. Her give up?! (Never!) (Progovac 2006: 41)

This analysis works for the (mostly) English examples discussed by Progovac (2006), but there are instances of fragments for which the small clause analysis fails. For instance, the German fragment in (42a) seems to be acceptable just like its English counterpart (39) is, but, unlike in English (40), it cannot be embedded under a verb in a matrix clause (42b).  Reich (2017) presents further arguments against a small clause analysis of German XP-YP fragments, which are based on corpus data from newspaper headlines. He concludes that such cases involve a null copula and consequently analyzes (42a) as underlyingly sentential.

(42) a. Das this ein a Angebot?! bargain

21This analysis can be traced back to Stowell (1981), see Citko (2011) for an overview of alternative structural analyses of small clauses.

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

	- I find this is a bargain

Furthermore, in question-answer pairs like (19), repeated here as (43), fragments can consist of two non-predicative DPs with an omitted main verb. A small clause analysis is ruled out in this case, because the missing verbal element is not the copula. It is unclear how Barton & Progovac (2005) would account for such fragments without assuming an unarticulated verbal node, ellipsis, or a discontinuous fragment, which their account cannot derive.

(43) [Waiter to customers in the restaurant:] Who ordered what? Customer: She ordered the deep dish pizza.

The nonsentential account hence predicts that only expressions consisting of a single constituent are possible fragments. Otherwise, the grammar assumed by Barton & Progovac (2005) would not be able to generate them. Progovac's (2006) small clause analysis accounts for some apparent non-constituent fragments, but presupposes that small clauses are grammatical in the a language. The comparison between German and English suggests that similar fragments are acceptable in both languages even though the small clause analysis does not account for the relevant data in German (Reich 2017). Furthermore, (43) suggests that even in English not all fragments can be traced back to a small clause.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Constituency under sentential accounts**

Merchant's (2004a) movement and deletion account also predicts that fragments are always single constituents. As their derivation involves movement to [Spec, FP] for feature checking purposes, only one constituent can be moved at a time. The reason for this is that there is only one landing site for the fragment: the specifier of a head carrying the E feature.22 Of course, there are no restrictions on the internal complexity of this constituent, so that Merchant (2004a) can account for small clause (41a) or VP fragments (44):

(44) What would you like to do tonight? Go to the cinema, I'd like to.

22If multiple specifiers are assumed, as the minimalist program permits (Chomsky 1995: 285) this restriction obviously does not hold anymore. However, Merchant (2004a) does not seem to resort to multiple specifiers in order to explain apparent non-constituent fragments.

### 2 Theories of fragments

As Merchant (2004a) allows for unarticulated structure in his elliptical sentences, the set of apparent non-constituent fragments that his account can explain is larger than that covered by the nonsentential account. For instance, a sequence of a temporal and a locative adverbial does not form a small clause but seems to be felicitous as a fragment (45). For the movement and deletion account to derive such fragments, they need to form a single constituent at some point of the derivation. The assumption that this is possible in case of such adverbials is supported by German data from Haider (2000). Haider observes that such *clusters* consisting of event-related adverbials, may appear together in the German sentence-initial prefield (46), which is generally considered to host only one constituent (see also the discussion of experiment 10 in Section <IP_ADDRESS>).23

A similar point is made by Müller (2002) in his analysis of (apparent) multiple prefield constituents in German. As pointed out above, German declarative matrix clauses are verb-second (in what follows, V2), so that only one constituent may precede the inflected verb. In spite of this, Müller (2002, 2003, 2005) reports a diverse sample of corpus data which seem to violate this constraint. For instance, in (47), taken from Müller (2005: 38), a locative and a temporal PP, which do not straightforwardly form a single constituent, can appear together in the prefield.24 Müller (2002) develops a HPSG account of such data, whose central assumption is that the prefield consists of a single constituent which is headed by an unarticulated verb.

(47) [Vor ago drei three Wochen] weeks [in in Memphis] Memphis hatte had Stich Stich noch still in in drei three Sätzen sets gegen against Connors Connors verloren. lost 'Three weeks ago in Memphis Stich had still lost in three sets against Connors.'

23Haider (2000: 104–105) also rules out an alternative derivation that fronts the complete VP after extracting the verb for independent reasons, but cf. Müller (2004) for such a proposal.

24Note that, unlike (44), this example does not involve fronting of the complete VP.

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

The exact predictions of the movement and deletion account thus depend to a large extent on how many and which movement operations and covert elements are assumed in general, therefore it is difficult to derive testable predictions unless there is consensus on these preliminary assumptions. The picture becomes even more complicated if a fine-grained left periphery is assumed. Even in the original sketch of the CP layer in Rizzi (1997) there is a further topic projection above FocP, and Benincà & Poletto (2004) distinguish about half a dozen highly specified functional projections, most of which are located above those related to focus. Depending on where Merchant (2004a) would locate the E feature in a language, the material in these projections could survive ellipsis, so that (if these projections exist in a language) the movement and deletion account predicts the possibility of genuine non-constituent fragments in highly specific informationstructural configurations. Finally, the version of movement and deletion by Weir (2014a) also accounts for non-constituent fragments. Weir simply adjoins the moved constituents to CP and, since adjunction is recursive, there is no upper bound limit on the number of constituents extracted with this mechanism.

Taken together, the existence of (apparently) discontinuous fragments as evidence for or against specific accounts of fragments does not seem promising, because theories that in principle predict constituency to be a determining property of fragments can account for some instances of what superficially must be classified as non-constituents. Specifically, movement and deletion requires an extensive set of preliminary assumptions about which syntactic operations and functional projections are available in a given language in order to make clear predictions on non-constituent fragments. Therefore, I do not use constituency directly as a diagnostic for particular theories.25

### **2.4.3 Information structure and focus**

All sentential accounts of fragments discussed so far (Merchant 2004a, Reich 2007, Weir 2014a) assume that information structure, in particular the focusbackground structure of an utterance, determines which words can be omitted in fragments. Since the nonsentential account of fragments does not impose information-structural licensing conditions on fragments, focus-sensitivity could appear to be a promising testing ground to differentiate between sentential and nonsentential accounts. Reich (2007) and Weir (2014a) make the strongest claim on the issue by assuming that fragments are necessarily focused. Reich argues

25An exception is experiment 10, which compares the acceptability of apparent multiple prefield configurations as fragments and full sentences. However, the experiment does not depend on a specific syntactic analysis of the constructions tested, but on the parallelism between fragments and left dislocations predicted by the movement and deletion account.

### 2 Theories of fragments

that only F-marked expressions survive ellipsis, whereas Weir considers focus to trigger exceptional movement.26

As for Merchant (2004a), this is less clear: On the one hand, he tentatively suggests identifying the landing site for fragments as a FocP (Merchant 2004a: 675), on the other hand he emphasizes similarities between fragments and CLLD (Merchant 2004a: 703). However, according to the literature on CLLD, this construction does not involve focus movement but targets a topic position.27 Further confusion on the status of the presumed left dislocation of fragments comes from the German data in (48). Merchant (2004a: 702) argues that the form of pronouns in the preverbal position (the *prefield*) equals that in the fragments in (49) (judgments are Merchant's).

(49) \*Dasi /\*Esi wollte ich *t*i .

The structure in (48a) is derived neither by CLLD nor by focus movement, because it is a garden-variety verb-second declarative matrix clause. As I discuss in greater detail in Section <IP_ADDRESS>, the mainstream analysis of German V2 consists in moving the inflected verb to C, whose specifier must be filled by any other constituent (den Besten 1989). Crucially, there are almost no restrictions on the category or information-structural status of the constituent in [Spec, CP], which can be an aboutness or contrastive topic as well as a focus (Frey 2005). If (48a) is a standard verb-second clause and the mainstream analysis of V2 is correct,28 the

26If there is more than one focus, their predictions might differ with respect to ordering. Reich (2007) predicts the same ordering as in regular sentences, but for Weir's theory it matters whether several exceptional movement operations proceed from the top of the syntax tree to its bottom or vice-versa. E is located on the C head dominating the whole TP, so that if the constituents closest to E were evacuated first, both accounts would predict differing orderings.

27Benincà & Poletto (2004: 53) distinguish between topic and focus positions in the left periphery by noting that the former "are connected with a clitic or a *pro* in the sentence", while the latter leave a variable which is bound by the moved phrase. Based on mostly Spanish data, Arregi (2003) argues that CLLDed constituents are contrastive topics. Contrastive topics differ from foci both in their syntactic properties and in their prosody (see e.g. Büring 1997, Krifka 2007).

28Müller (2004) proposes an analysis of V2 that consists in VP fronting after those constituents that appear in post-verbal positions have been extracted. As he assumes that the VP contains only the finite verb and the prefield when it is fronted, it makes the same predictions as the mainstream account of V2, that is, the verb must survive ellipsis in fragments.

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

fragment in (49b) cannot be derived from (49a) by assuming an E feature on C: E triggers only PF-deletion of the complement of C, hence the account incorrectly predicts the verb to survive ellipsis:29 Furthermore, the structure in (48a) is not an instance of CLLD. Even though German declarative matrix clauses are verbsecond, a further constituent can be placed left of the prefield (50). DPs appearing there sometimes exhibit no case connectivity at all (50a) and must therefore be analyzed as a hanging topic (Rodman 1974, Vat 1981), but in (50b) the DP *den Peter* resembles CLLD in being case-marked. Unlike (48a), both of these structures require doubling of the left-peripheral constituent by a pronoun.

	- b. Den the.acc Peter, Peter, den him habe have ich I gestern yesterday erst just getroffen. met. 'Peter, I just met him yesterday.'

However, the structure in (50b) cannot be the source of fragments. If E is located on C, again, both the verb and the pronoun would survive ellipsis. The derivation in Figure 2.4 shows that this would yield the ungrammatical *\*Den Peter, den habe*. Taken together, E cannot be located on C in German.

Merchant (2004a)specifies the syntactic properties of different varieties of E in their lexical entries, so there is no principled reason to assume that the German EF must also be [*u*C\*]. If it had an [*u*F\*] feature and were thus located on F, as Merchant (2004a) initially suggested for English, the verb would always be PF-deleted and the existence of DP fragments straightforwardly explained. The problem with this assumption is that Merchant (2004a) rejected it in order to account for the island sensitivity of fragments based on the PF-deletion of illegal traces (see Section 2.4.4 for discussion). Therefore, if the E feature was located on a F head above CP in German, German fragments should not be island-sensitive, but (51) shows that they are.30

	- b. Nein, no Charlie Charlie spricht speaks die the gleiche same Balkansprache, balkan.language die that Ben Ben spricht. speaks 'No, Charlie speaks the same Balkan language that Ben speaks.'

29A possible explanation would be that T-to-C movement of the verb occurs only in order to satisfy some PF constraint and is therefore not required (which is equivalent to not being allowed in minimalism) in elliptical sentences. I am not aware of any proposal in this direction. 30Merchant (2004a) judges the English counterpart of (51b) as ungrammatical when it is interpreted as (ia). If (51b) was interpreted as (ib), he predicts the fragment to be grammatical, because fronting *Charlie* in the matrix clause does not require the extraction out of an island.

### 2 Theories of fragments

Figure 2.4: The derivation shows that if the E feature was located on [Spec, CP], German finite words are incorrectly predicted to survive ellipsis in fragments.

	- b. \*Nein, no *Charlie*. Charlie 'No, Charlie.' (translated from Merchant 2004a: 708)

Taken together, the predictions of Merchant (2004a) with respect to focus marking are vague, because it is not totally clear whether he assumes fragments to target the focus position [Spec, FP] or whether their landing site is [Spec, CP]. Neither of these versions can account for the full range of the data discussed in this section. The exceptional movement version of the theory (Weir 2014a) does not require information structure-related projections as FocP but simply adjoins fragments to CP, so that it is not affected by these issues.

Nonsentential accounts do not make reference to focus, but the conditions on fragment use that they require are related to information-structural notions. Barton (1990) proposes to "delete up to recoverability" and Stainton (2006) requires that a salient nonlinguistic LF which allows to enrich the fragment to a proposition must be present in context. As foci tend toward being new and consequently not recoverable, both of these ideas make similar predictions with respect to the acceptability of fragments as a focus-based account.

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

Focus sensitivity therefore does not offer a promising testing ground to distinguish the predictions of the theories of fragments that I investigate. Besides that, the effect of focus is relatively difficult to investigate experimentally. In German and English, focus is often marked prosodically with a H\* pitch accent (Gussenhoven 1983, Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg 1990) and the prominence of prosodic focus marking varies gradually as a function of the size of the focus domain Baumann et al. (2006, 2007). This is hard to manipulate experimentally: As Baumann et al. (2007) report, speakers make use of different strategies to modulate the prosodic prominence of foci, so that items might not be understood as intended. Furthermore, while work in experimental pragmatics has provided evidence for an effect of pitch accents on interpretation of complete sentences (see e.g. Chevallier et al. 2008, Zondervan 2010), it is difficult to apply this to fragments. For instance, in DP fragments consisting only of a noun and an article, the most prominent accent always falls on the noun, hence it is not possible to vary the pitch accents on fragments in order to elicit different focus structures.

### **2.4.4 Evidence for movement**

In contrast to any of the other accounts, Merchant's (2004a) theory requires fragments to undergo obligatory movement to a left-peripheral position. From a naïve perspective, this predicts that only expressions that can occur in a leftperipheral position, more specifically, to the left of the head hosting the E feature, are possible fragments. Consequently, whatever might restrict movement to the left periphery in full sentences will also constrain the form of fragments. In the next chapter, I empirically investigate two of the movement restrictions discussed by Merchant (2004a). These restrictions, whose effects on the form of fragments have been first tested in Merchant et al. (2013), concern complement clause topicalization and preposition stranding. The reason for choosing these phenomena is that Merchant et al. (2013) present the first experimental evidence on them, what suggests that they consider them a valid testing ground for the movement and deletion account. Preposition stranding restrictions have the additional advantage that they cannot be overridden by exceptional movement according to Weir (2015) and hence also allow us to test Weir's (2014a) version of the theory.

The idea that movement restrictions constrain the form of fragments is exemplified for complement clause topicalization in (52) and (53), from Merchant (2004a: 690): As has been repeatedly claimed in the theoretical literature (see e.g. Morgan 1973, Chomsky 1981, Stowell 1981, Webelhuth 1992), the complementizer in English non-factive complement clauses is optional when the complement

### 2 Theories of fragments

clause appears in its base position (52a), but becomes obligatory when the complement clause appears in the left-periphery (52b). Merchant (2004a) observes that the same holds for fragments (53). He concludes that this is unexpected under the in situ deletion account, because the complementizer would be optional in fragments too if their underlying structure was (52a) instead of (52b). The other movement restrictions discussed by Merchant (2004a) behave similarly, that is, expressions which cannot appear in the left periphery seem to be unacceptable as fragments.

Merchant (2004a) interprets such data as evidence in favor of his account, but in order for this to constitute valid evidence for movement in fragments, it is necessary to rule out alternative explanations for the observed pattern, which do not require movement. Throughout this book, some of these data will turn out to be relatively straightforwardly captured by the nonsentential or the in situ deletion accounts. For instance, a construction might have properties that block both movement in full sentences and ellipsis in fragments without having to assume that the latter necessarily undergo movement.

Besides this need for caution when interpreting coincidences between fragments and left dislocation as evidence for movement, acceptable fragments that cannot be left-dislocated potentially constitute counterevidence to Merchant's (2004a) theory. If ungrammatical left dislocations in full sentences always yielded unacceptable fragments, movement and deletion would be falsified even by the most basic examples, such as the unavailability of fronting of a DP which is not contrastive in English (Weir 2014a), or the island-sensitivity of fragments described by Merchant (2004a). This requires them to assume *repair effects* (Merchant 2004a) or exceptional movement (Weir 2014a) in order to conceal the theory with conflicting data.

Repair effects are widely acknowledged in the literature on ellipsis (see e.g. Fox & Lasnik 2003, Merchant 2008, Müller 2011, Lasnik 2015). The general observation is that in some cases ellipses are acceptable even though the presumably underlying nonelliptical structure is not. The idea is that ellipsis can remedy illformed structures by deleting those expressions that cause the problem. Since ellipsis is a PF phenomenon, this concerns only degraded PFs, but not derivations which are ungrammatical in the narrow syntax. A prototypical instance

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

of such repair effects is the island-insensitivity of sluicing. Recall that Merchant (2001) derives sluicing by regular *wh*-movement followed by deletion of the TP in the sluice. (54a) shows that sluicing is fine although the derivation assumed by Merchant involves an ungrammatical island violation: The *wh*-phrase must be extracted across the boundary of the embedded relative clause introduced by *who speaks* (54b).

	- b. \*They want to hire someone who speaks a Balkan language, but I don't remember [which Balkan language]i they want to hire someone who speaks *t*i .

Figure 2.5: Derivation of a fragment answer to (55) according to Merchant (2004a: 708).

Merchant (2004a: 706) accounts for this by assuming that traces of movement across island boundaries have a feature \*, which renders PF representations that contain such features uninterpretable. As Merchant assumes that ellipsis is PFdeletion, it can delete such traces at PF and thus "repair" the defective structure. Merchant notes that his hypothesis can also account for the observation that sluicing is not sensitive to islands but other ellipses, like VPE and fragments, are. In sluicing, the E feature is located on C, so that it deletes all intermediate \**t* traces within the TP at PF. In contrast, movement in fragments targets [Spec, FP] and, by proceeding cyclically, it leaves a \**t* in [Spec, CP], as the derivation of

### 2 Theories of fragments

fragment answer to (55) in Figure 2.5 shows. The trace in the specifier survives ellipsis and causes the derivation to crash, because E is placed on C in fragments.

(55) Does Abby speak the same Balkan language that Ben speaks?

In fact, the need to account for the island sensitivity of fragments is what motivates Merchant to reject his initial assumption that E is placed on F in fragments, which is illustrated in Figure 2.6. If this derivation was correct, the PF-deletion of the defective trace would render fragments insensitive to islands, just like Merchant (2001) argues for sluicing.

Figure 2.6: Derivation of fragments without an intermediate CP according to Merchant (2004a: 675).

Repair effects complicate the use of parallelisms between fragments and sentences as a diagnostic for movement. As Merchant (2004a: 711) puts it, "[…] the general argument is that parallelisms support a movement and ellipsis analysis, while non-parallelisms reveal repair effects." Nevertheless, repair effects cannot just be stipulated but require an analysis, like the one involving the \* feature on traces that results from island violation.

Weir's (2014a) exceptional movement account predicts an even larger set of mismatches between fragments and sentences than Merchant (2004a) because exceptional movement occurs only in fragments and is therefore relatively independent from movement in sentences. Weir only restricts exceptional movement to those movement operations that are "in principle" available in a language. The derivation of empirically testable predictions for his account would require criteria that define which types of movement are available in principle and which are not, but Weir (2015: 10) offers no such criteria and instead proposes that it "is most easily shown by example" how a movement operation is to be classified. He exemplifies this reasoning with the impossibility of fronting NPIs (56a) and

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

bare quantifiers (57a) in English (the judgments are Weir's) and argues that left dislocation of such expressions is not blocked due to a syntactic restriction because argument DPs can be fronted in English (58). Consequently, he attributes the ungrammaticality of (56a) and (57a) to some kind of semantic ill-formedness and takes this to illustrate the PF-only character of exceptional movement.

The absence of criteria for which types of movement are in principle available makes it almost impossible to empirically evaluate the exceptional movement account. However, what matters from an empirical perspective is that Weir (2015: 11) explicitly excludes P-stranding (Pullum & Huddleston 2002), and left-branch extraction (Ross 1967, Bǒsković 2005) in languages which do not allow for either of these operations from the set of movement operations that are available in principle. Therefore, languages which do not lack these phenomena but which will allow for the generation of the corresponding fragments would also provide evidence against exceptional movement.

Repair effects, and in particular exceptional movement, notably complicate the predictions of the movement and deletion account on the correlation between the acceptability of fragments and left dislocation. Specifically, some of the mismatches in acceptability between acceptable elliptical and nonelliptical structures would not provide evidence against movement and deletion if they can be explained by some kind of repair effect. Nevertheless, repair effects increase the complexity of the theory and therefore require independently motivated accounts that justify them. The assumption of defective traces by Merchant (2004a) discussed above might provide such an account, but it still requires independent empirical evidence, for instance, one showing that similar observations can be made for related phenomena. However, and in the first place, empirical perspective however, the movement and deletion account requires evidence *for* movement in fragments that cannot be explained by other theories, like nonsentential approaches or the derivationally simpler in situ deletion account.

### 2 Theories of fragments

### **2.4.5 Summary**

In this section I have discussed different potential testing grounds which might allow for the empirical evaluation of the competing accounts of fragments. Their respective predictions are summarized in Table 2.1.

> Table 2.1: Overview of the empirical predictions the accounts of fragments make on the phenomena discussed in this section. The predictions of Merchant (2004a) with respect to non-constituent fragments and effects of movement restrictions depend on further theory-internal assumptions. Non-constituent fragment is predicted ot be acceptable when multiple movement to the left periphery is possible, e.g. in Italian (Cinque 1990, Rizzi 1997). Under the exceptional movement version of the theory (Weir 2014a), movement restriction effects are only expected for movement which is unavailable *in principle* in a language.

With respect to the question of whether fragments involve unarticulated structure, case connectivity effects, specifically with respect to structural case marking in fragments, turn out to be the most promising testing ground. Sentential accounts predict strict case connectivity, whereas the nonsentential account predicts that fragments cannot appear in structural case and will exhibit default case morphology instead. As argued above, whether a specific case is structural case in a language or whether it is not might be controversial, but the alternative, focus sensitivity, is even more difficult to test. The nonsentential account does not rely on the concept of focus, but makes similar predictions due to the necessity to retrieve deleted expressions from context. Furthermore, it is difficult to empirically elicit specific focus structures, because focus is mostly encoded prosodically in English and German (see e.g. Zimmermann & Onea 2011: 1658–1660).

Testing whether fragments are derived by movement and deletion, as claimed by Merchant (2004a), obviously requires the investigation of whether movement

### 2.4 Testable predictions of theories of fragments

restrictions constrain the form of fragments: Restrictions on the form of fragments and left-dislocated expressions would provide evidence for movement and deletion and the corresponding mismatches evidence against it. As for the former, it must also be shown that the nonsentential or the in situ deletion accounts cannot account for the data, while the possibility of repair effects must be considered in case of apparent non-parallelisms. My experiments investigating movement restrictions take the studies by Merchant et al. (2013) on preposition omission and complementizer omission as a starting point. The first of these phenomena will also allow for conclusions on Weir's (2014a) exceptional movement theory, which seems to have a greater empirical coverage than the original version of movement and deletion, but it is also harder to test because of the lack of clear criteria that would distinguish movement operations that can occur in fragments from those that cannot.

As for the assumption that fragments are inherently ungrammatical, I noted above that it is impossible to verify but that it still can be falsified by evidence for linguistic constraints on the form of fragments that cannot be reduced to being the result of game-theoretic reasoning, as Bergen & Goodman (2015) suggest.

In the next chapter, I present a series of experiments that test some of the predictions of the competing theories of fragments which I discussed in this section. Currently there is no consensus on the appropriate syntactic analysis of fragments, and there has been no systematic and empirical investigation of the partially contrary predictions of the theories. My experiments will to some extent fill this gap. The experiments address two main questions that allow us to differentiate between the theories presented in this chapter: First, I test whether fragments are underlyingly sentential. Since the results support a sentential account, I address the question of whether movement restrictions constrain the form of fragments at the case of preposition omission, complementizer omission and multiple prefield constituents in German. Furthermore, the results on the syntax of fragments inform my experiments on their usage in Chapter 5.

# **3 Experiments on the syntax of fragments**

In this chapter I present 11 experiments that empirically evaluate the theories of fragments which I introduced in the preceding chapter.1 The experiments address two main research questions: First, the experiments1–3 investigate whether fragments are underlyingly sentential or whether they are genuine nonsententials. Since the experiments provide evidence for unarticulated structure in fragments, the experiments 4–10 test whether the generation of fragments obligatorily involves movement or whether fragments are the result of in situ deletion.

The experiments contribute to the theoretical analysis of fragments, by providing further empirical data on the competing theories' predictions. The experiments on default case and multiple prefield constituents are the first attempts to empirically investigate theoretical assumptions that are solely based on introspective data so far and the studies on preposition omission and complement clause topicalization extend previous experimental research. Additionally, these experiments will settle the ground for the experiments on the usage of fragments in Chapter 5, which requires to determine *which* fragments are grammatical. Since the account of fragment usage that I propose in Chapter 4 presupposes that speakers choose between grammatical utterances, so its empirical predictions would be distorted by the inclusion of ungrammatical fragments in the set of utterances among which a speaker can choose. For instance, if fragments were subject to movement restrictions, as Merchant (2004a) argues, only those expressions that can appear in a left-peripheral position would be possible fragments.

This chapter is structured as follows. Section 3.1 presents the experiments that test whether fragments are sentential (experiments 1–3). I use structural case marking on DP fragments as a testing ground for this, because Barton & Progovac (2005) argue that DP fragments cannot appear in structural case. The experiments support a sentential account, since they show that, provided an appropriate context, structural case is preferred over default case in fragments.

1Experiments 1, 4, 5, 8 and 9 have been published in Lemke (2017). The statistical analyses differ from those reported here, but the conclusions drawn from the data remain the same.

### 3 Experiments on the syntax of fragments

Sections 3.2–3.4 present the experiments on three movement restrictions: Preposition omission (experiments 4–7), complement clause topicalization (experiments 8, 9) and multiple prefield configurations in German (experiment 10). In Section 3.2, I present four experiments that investigate whether restrictions on preposition stranding constitute evidence for movement in fragments. The first two experiments support the pattern predicted by Merchant (2004a) for English and German, and the latter experiments investigate potential non-movement accounts of this pattern: Experiment 6 investigates a case checking-based approach to preposition omission in fragments by Progovac et al. (2006), which is disconfirmed. Experiment 7, however, suggests that, based on English data, a nonsyntactic relationship between question and answer can explain the data without necessarily assuming movement. Section 3.3 addresses complement clause topicalization with two experiments. In part, these studies replicate the effect reported by Merchant et al. (2013) for fragments, but crucially not for the corresponding left dislocation structures. The data hence cannot be interpreted as evidence for movement. Finally, in Section 3.4 I test the predictions of the movement and deletion account on fragments that are derived from ungrammatical multiple prefield configurations in German (experiment 10). Again, the experiment does not reveal the pattern predicted by Merchant's (2004a) theory. Section 3.5 summarizes the main results of the experiments.

## **3.1 Case marking as evidence for sententiality**

This section presents three experiments that test these predictions of sentential and nonsentential accounts with respect to structural case marking. As I discussed in Section 2.4.1, all sentential accounts predict case connectivity effects: DP fragments always receive the same case morphology as the corresponding DP within a full sentence, because the structure of the full sentence from which they are derived determines their case. In contrast, the nonsentential account by Barton & Progovac (2005) predicts that fragments may not receive structural case marking: Unlike default or inherent case, structural case needs to be checked by a verbal or functional head, which they argue is not present in DP fragments. Instead, they claim that DP fragments that exhibit structural case in full sentences appear in default case in fragments. The pattern is exemplified in (1). Barton & Progovac (2005) predict such anticonnectivity effects only for structural casemarked DPs, because inherent case, e.g. dative or genitive, is interpretable and therefore does not require feature checking.

### 3.1 Case marking as evidence for sententiality

Table 3.1: German inflectional case paradigm for masculine, feminine and neuter definite DPs (*the man*, *the woman*, *the book*).

(1) Who can eat another piece of cake? (Barton & Progovac 2005: 77)

a. ?\*I/?\*We/?\*He/?\*She.

b. Me/Us/Him/Her.

The case of pronouns is more complex than Barton & Progovac (2005) suggest. The crosslinguistic data on the contrast between strong, weak and tonic pronouns in Merchant (2004a) shows that not only case, but also information structure determines which form of a pronoun is selected. What is more, English has only reduced morphological case marking, therefore it is not the ideal language for testing differences between default, inherent and structural case. For this reason, in experiments 1–3 I investigate the phenomenon in German, a language that has a richer case system than English. In German there are four cases, whose morphological realization on definite DPs is exemplified in Table 3.1.

Case marking occurs most systematically on the article. There are some syncretic forms for plurals as well as for feminine and neuter singular DPs, but for some masculine singular DPs the determiner disambiguates fully between the four cases.2 Dative and genitive are inherent, because they are related to specific thematic roles or selected by specific lexical items.3 Given the discussion in the preceding section, accusative must be analyzed as structural case, which marks the direct object of a verb. Nominative marks the syntactic subject and is the default case in German (if such a concept is assumed at all).

2 For other masculine singular DPs only nominative is morphologically distinct from the remaining cases, as (i) shows. See e.g. Eisenberg (1999: 139–141) for details.

(i) der the.nom Student student.nom / / des the.gen Studenten student.gen / / dem the.dat Studenten student.dat / / den the.acc Studenten student.acc

3 See also Woolford (2006), who distinguishes between lexical case, that is selected by a lexical item and inherent case, which encodes a specific θ-role.

### 3 Experiments on the syntax of fragments

### **3.1.1 Experiment 1: Default case, acceptability rating study**

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Background**

In experiment 1, I investigate whether structural case connectivity effects occur in German. I test this with an acceptability rating task that compares nominative (2a) and accusative (2b) DP fragments. The nonsentential account by Barton & Progovac (2005) predicts that DP fragments cannot appear in structural case so that accusative DP fragments would be degraded as compared to nominative default case. In contrast, sentential accounts predict case connectivity: If the DP has accusative case marking in the full sentence from which it is derived, accusative is preferred over nominative.

(2) Jenny and David want to drive to the beach today. While David is packing the picnic basket, he says to Jenny:

The strength of connectivity effects expected under sentential accounts depends on the QuD or context that is accommodated. For instance, in (2), one could in principle assume either of the structures in (3) as underlying the fragment, but accusative is only licensed in the case of (3a). Therefore, if it was more natural to choose (3b) than (3a), sentential accounts would also predict a preference for nominative, which however would be explained by connectivity effects and not by default case morphology. In order to control the availability of structural case in a complete sentence, the fragments were preceded by a context story that made such a sentence salient. A pretest ensures that e.g. (3a) is accessible in this context. Furthermore, experiment 2 shows that accusative is also more likely to be used in a production task.

### 3.1 Case marking as evidence for sententiality

Table 3.2: Predictions of the nonsentential and sentential accounts on the acceptability of case-marking in fragments.