UnElided Basic Remnants in Germanic Ellipsis or: ÃœBRIGE Arguments

There are differing theories concerning the construction dubbed swiping by Merchant 2002. Some theories predict that the inverted preposition/wh-word order characteristic of swiping is idiosyncratic to prepositions and wh-words in particular and does not generalize to other elements. Other theories predict that swiping is merely a particular instantiation of a generalizable possibility for inverted word orders under ellipsis. In this paper I provide evidence for this latter type of theory by showing that the characteristics of swiping extend beyond prepositionals and wh-words. The generalization is that whatever can extrapose and be extracted from can enter into a swiping like construction. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/ vol20/iss1/20 U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 20.1, 2014 UnElided Basic Remnants in Germanic Ellipsis or: ÜBRIGE Arguments Bradley Larson 1 Basic Goals In this paper I seek to determine what is going on with examples like (1) seen below. Here we see that the normal English word order, wherein prepositions live up to their name, is altered. The preposition to appears to the right (or after) its object. This sort of construction has been dubbed Swiping (an acronym for Sluiced Wh-word Inversion with Prepositions In Northern Germanic) by Merchant (2002) and I will follow this usage here. (1) Dana was talking, but I don’t know who to. The example in (1) runs counter to our normal expectations concerning prepositions, and the question arises: Is swiping an idiosyncratic possibility for prepositions only or is it an instance of something more general? There have been two camps on the topic more or less. Ross 1969, Merchant 2002, Richards 1997, van Craenenbroeck 2004, and Hartman and Ai 2007 in effect argue that swiping is particular to prepositions whereas Kim 1997, Nakao, Ono, and Yoshida 2007, Hasegawa 2007, and Larson 2011 predict that swiping ought to generalize beyond prepositions. In this paper I provide evidence supporting this second view. I show that more than prepositions can undergo what looks like swiping. Any element that is optionally null, indefinite, and extraposable can be involved in swiping. In short, this will include certain gerundive and infinitival clauses in addition to preposition. Examples of these can be seen in (2) and (3) below. (2) Dana was caught, but I don’t know what doing. (3) Dana was eager, but I don’t know what to do. In the above examples there is a wh-word that appears outside of its base position and I posit that it has undergone the same sort of operations as the wh-word in (1) above. But before getting into this idea, let’s first take a look at previous accounts of swiping.