This paper investigates the reason why aggressively non-D-linked items such as wh-the-hell (WTH) are allowed in swiping, but not in sluicing. Investigating the potential syntactic, semantic and prosodic licensors of WTH in sluicing and swiping in the British English variety, we conclude that syntactic or semantic constraints cannot be the source of the difference. Instead, we propose a novel prosodic account in which the WTH must satisfy the prosodic licensing condition that it cannot bear nuclear accent. We show that this is satisfied in swiping, but not in sluicing contexts. On the basis of the novel findings of an acceptability rating study of swiping, which reveal that both ‘given’ and ‘new’ prepositions are equally acceptable for British English speakers, we argue that the preposition is accentuated in this elliptical construction because it is structurally the deepest element. The licensing condition on WTHs in sluicing and swiping is therefore not mediated directly by the conditions on ellipsis, but by the particular prosodic distribution that a WTH happens to have in sluicing and swiping. We extend the account to similar constructions in Dutch.
This article offers a new morphosyntactic account of subject agreement in the Turkish verbal domain. The account is based on a combination of well-known, novel, and overlooked observations about the distribution and prosody of verbal agreement. In Turkish, when certain morphosyntactic requirements are met and the verb is focused, as in fragment answers with ellipsis, the agreement morpheme can be parsed inside or outside of the prosodically prominent part of the verbal domain that constitutes the fragment answer. I claim that this optionality is a reflex of how the morphemes that constitute the verbal domain are postsyntactically concatenated. In particular, I argue that an agreement morpheme either lowers together with its host (full lowering) or is stranded when its host lowers (partial lowering). In full lowering, agreement is contained within the prominent part of the verbal domain, whereas in partial lowering, agreement falls outside of this prominence domain. I also show that the prosodic variability in question is observed only when two related noncanonical realizations of agreement are possible: medial agreement and double agreement. The Vocabulary Insertion rules that I postulate for the subject-agreement paradigms of the Turkish verbal domain capture the acceptable cases of medial and double agreement and successfully predict in which environments medial agreement is optional and in which environments it is obligatory. This work stems from research carried out with Aslı G€ oksel between 2012 and 2019; its origins can be traced to a discussion in G€ oksel 2010 of the interesting prosodic behavior of agreement in Turkish (originally observed by Seb€ uktekin 1984). Aslı G€ oksel and I have presented phonological and morphophonological analyses of the data discussed here in a variety of venues, such as the ninth Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (2013), LingDay 2013 (Bo gazic ßi University), the workshop The Word and the Morpheme (Humboldt University of Berlin, 2016), and ComSyn (Leiden University, 2017). I thank each of the audiences for their questions and comments. This work has also benefited from comments and suggestions made by Jonathan Bobaljik, Lisa Cheng, James Griffiths, Barıs ß Kabak, Anik o Lipt ak, Jason Merchant, Andrew Nevins, and two anonymous referees. This research was funded by the Dutch Research Council.
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