Sluicing and the inquisitive potential of appositives

Abstract

This paper investigates experimentally the generalizations made in An-derBois (2010, 2011, 2014) that a sluice may never take an appositive clause as its antecedent. We find that experimental participants rated sentences with sluiceantecedents in appositives as acceptable. We highlight two factors which influence the acceptability of appositive antecedents for sluices: whether the indefinite NP antecedent and the stranded wh-item include descriptive content (e.g., a man, which man), and whether the appositive clause engages with an issue raised in the preceding context. We argue that AnderBois's claim that appositive clauses are conventionally unable to antecede sluices is too restrictive and suggest that any theory of sluicing must allow appositive clauses to antecede sluices.

Ellipsis licensing and redundancy reduction: A focus-based approach

“…In this section, we argue that there is little motivation for the move to Q-equivalence approaches. We demonstrate this by first revisiting the empirical motivations in AnderBois (2011), and recap the results reported in Collins et al (2015) that challenge AnderBois's 2011 data. We then consider an additional argument for Q-equivalence from Barros (2013), and present novel data challenging Barros's 2013 conclusions.…”

“…Indeed, if the data in (24) really do bear on the analysis of sluicing, AnderBois's analytical move counts as an empirically well motivated one. However, Collins et al (2015) report experimental results where participants rated sluices with doubly negated antecedents poorly, and importantly, just as poorly as those same examples without sluicing, 13 so that AnderBois's reported judgements with double negation do not bear on sluicing at all, but instead have to do with the oddness of double negation more generally.…”

“…They nonetheless adhere to Q-equivalence as a means of licensing sluicing-despite stripping the force of AnderBois's empirical arguments, their experimental results undermining those arguments at every turn-for reasons that are orthogonal to our aims and which we will not repeat here. Here we will use the results in Collins et al (2015) as undermining the empirical motivation for Q-equivalence, and providing support for our claim that a unified focus-theoretic semantic approach to ellipsis identity should be favored on conceptual grounds.…”

“…3.1.1 AnderBois (2011) vs. Collins et al (2015) Collins et al (2015) presents results that challenge AnderBois's (2011) empirical motivations for Q-equivalence. They nonetheless adhere to Q-equivalence as a means of licensing sluicing-despite stripping the force of AnderBois's empirical arguments, their experimental results undermining those arguments at every turn-for reasons that are orthogonal to our aims and which we will not repeat here.…”

“…VPE, on the other hand, is claimed to be subject to a distinct licensing condition, taken to be e-givenness in AnderBois (2011). Collins et al (2015) reports on the results of an experimental study that showed that sluicing was in fact possible when the antecedent was contained in an appositive. An important factor in predicting acceptability is whether the indefinite correlate and whremnant have the same informativity status (to borrow the term from Collins et al 2015).…”