Dutch preposition stranding and ellipsis: ‘Merchant’s Wrinkle’ ironed out

On Preposition Stranding

The phenomena of preposition stranding is very rare when examining various languages around the world. The most distinct class of languages that demonstrates this is that of the Germanic languages. Behavior within the Germanic languages varies from one language to the next. On the one end, Danish, as Herslund (1984:58) puts it, “...allows almost completely free stranding of prepositions.” Horns...

Preposition Stranding in English: Predicting Speakers’ Behaviour

meaning of the preposition 0.014 length of the extracted phrase 0.036 spatial meaning of the preposition 0.04 agentivity of the head noun 0.104 phrasal-prepositional verbs 0.114 frequency of the preposition 0.115 barrierhood of the extracted phrase 0.119 prepositional verbs 0.126 concreteness of the head noun 0.132 copula as verb 0.153 entrenchment of the head noun 0.165 intransitive verbs 0.16...

Preposition stranding and pied-piping in second language acquisition

The present paper endeavours to investigate whether L1 Persian speakers are sensitive to a ‘poverty of the stimulus’ situation in English: the asymmetrical constraint on piedpiping and stranding constructions. Both prepositions and particles can be stranded in interrogatives and relative clauses, but only prepositional phrases can appear in piedpiping structures. In contrast, Persian licenses p...

v-Stranding VPE: Ellipsis in Farsi complex predicates

English was long considered the only language to possess Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), a process in which a verb phrase, identified in many standard accounts with the vP, goes missing under identity with the vP of an antecedent clause. An example of VPE in English is given in (1), where the elements struck through are not pronounced. A schematization of the relevant part of the structure is given...

Variable vs. Categorical Effects Preposition Pied Piping and Stranding in British English Relative Clauses