Clause types, intonation and stranded embedded clauses

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the properties of a construction in Korean speech that has not received much attention in the literature. I refer to the construction in question as the ‘stranded embedded clause’ (SEC). SECs are a special type of echoed utterance, where an utterance in the form of an embedded clause is repeated for various reasons. The characteristic properties of the SEC involve the fact that there can be a mismatch between the type of the clause indicated by the clause type marker that they contain and the actual illocutionary force of the utterance that is indicated by its prosody. The complementizer is also obligatory, despite the fact that no matrix clause element shows up—hence, the name stranded embedded clause. I propose a deletion-based analysis of SECs, where they start out as a full-fledged embedded clause in a complex sentence and undergo movement, followed by deletion of the rest of the clause. It should be noted that this is essentially how fragment answers (and some other ellipsis constructions) have been analysed in the literature. Indeed, I show that there is a parallelism between SECs and fragment answers, which I argue provides support for the deletion-based approach to the former.