Movement and deletion

While Reich (2007) develops a unified account of fragments and gapping, Mer-chant (2004a) observes a set of similarities between fragments and sluicing. This motivates the extension of his theory of sluicing (Merchant 2001), which derives sluices by regular wh-movement followed by ellipsis of the remnant, to frag-ments. The central claim of the account is that all fragments undergo movement to a left-peripheral position before ellipsis applies to the remnant.

According to Merchant (2004a), ellipsis is triggered by a specific syntactic item, the E feature. Merchant argues that there are different varieties of E, each of which is related to a specific type of ellipsis, such as sluicing (Merchant 2001), fragments (Merchant 2004a) and VP ellipsis (Merchant 2013). Each variety of E has its own lexicon entry, which encodes its syntactic, phonologic and semantic

properties. To illustrate the idea, the derivation that Merchant assumes for the sluice in (20) is given in Figure 2.1.⁹

(20) Abby was reading something, but I don’t know what⟨Abby was

read-ingt⟩. (Merchant 2004a:

670)

CP

C’

TP

Abby was readingt C^[E]_[wh,Q]

what_[wh]

Figure 2.1: Derivation of the sluice in (20) according to Merchant (2004a: 670).

E is always located on the head of a functional projection, like CP in Figure 2.1.

The syntactic properties of E, which consist of a set of uninterpretable features, determine which head can host the feature. For instance, E_S, the E feature found in sluicing, has the features [uwh*, uQ*] (Merchant 2004a: 670). This ensures that it can be hosted only by heads that are [wh,Q] and that therefore can check these features, such as C in interrogatives. The variants of E found in other types of ellipsis may have different feature specifications and are thereby restricted to other functional heads. Merchant (2004a: 671) suggests that the varieties of E are identical with respect to their phonology and semantics and differ only in these syntactic specifications. The phonological effect of the E feature is that the complement of the head it is located on remains unarticulated at PF. In (20), this concerns the complete TP of the second conjunct in (20). Both sentential accounts discussed so far, Merchant (2004a) and Reich (2007), agree that no syntactic struc-ture is deleted during the derivation. Even though parts of it are unarticulated

9Merchant (2004a: 671) notes that the assumption of independent lexical entries for the specific varieties of E also accounts for crosslinguistic variation. For instance, he argues that German has no VP ellipsis because this language lacks the corresponding variety of E, while it shares with English the varieties found in fragments and sluicing.

at PF, the unarticulated words are still present on LF. In (20), this results in the wh-phrase being the only articulated word in the sluice, because it leaves the ellipsis site throughwh-movement to [Spec, CP].

According to Merchant (2004a), the licensing condition on omissions in frag-ments ise-givenness, which is included in the semantics of the E feature (21): E requires the complement of the head hosting E to be e-given. E-givenness is the identity condition licensing ellipsis in Merchant’s theory and consists basically in a bidirectional givenness relation in the sense of Schwarzschild (1999). An ex-pression E counts as e-given when it has a salient antecedent A which entails the existential closure of the focus value of A and vice versa.

(21) [[E]] =𝜆p: e-given (p) [p] (Merchant 2004a: 672) The requirement for the complement of the head hosting E to be e-given ensures that ellipsis is licensed only if there is a structurally parallel antecedent available in context, and that it is blocked if there remains a constituent within the comple-ment that is not e-given. (22) exemplifies the mechanism for the sluicing example in (20): The antecedent has the focus structure in (22a), whose existential closure (22b) is entailed by the sluice (22c). As the existential closure of (22c) is identical to the one of the antecedent in (22b), the opposite relation also holds, so that the ellipsis in (20) is licensed by e-givenness.

(22) a. Abby was reading [something]_F. b. ∃x. Abby was reading x

c. Abby was reading [what]_F.

Merchant (2004a) extends this analysis to fragments. His theory accounts for discourse-initial fragments (see below for details), but he focuses mostly on short answer fragments like (23), for which he assumes the structure in Figure 2.2.

Again, the E feature is hosted by C in the left periphery, while the fragment is moved to the specifier of a functional projection FP immediately above CP. This movement operation proceeds cyclically through [Spec, CP].

(23) a. Who did she see? (Merchant 2004a: 673)

b. John.

The major difference between sluicing and fragments is that E_F, the variety of E found in fragments, and E_Shave different syntactic features, which are [uC*,uF]

for E_F and [uwh*,uQ*] for E_S. The stronguC* feature ensures that E is located on a C head, while the weakuF feature can be checked under Agree (Merchant 2004a: 707), because weak features don’t need to be checked locally according to

FP F’

CP C’

TP she sawt₂ C^[E]

[t₂] F [_DPJohn]₂

Figure 2.2: Derivation of the fragment answer in (23b) according to Merchant (2004a).

the theory. Otherwise, the derivation is identical to sluicing: After the fragment has been moved, ellipsis applies to the TP.

With respect to the landing site of the fragment in [Spec, FP], Merchant avoids committing himself to an analysis of what kind of projection FP is. However, Mer-chant (2004a: 675) tentatively suggests that it is a focus projection in the sense of Rizzi (1997).^10,11 Whether or not FP is a focus projection is highly relevant to the theory, because this would provide an explanation for why movement in fragments would occur at all. Since Merchant’s theory is embedded in a mini-malist framework (Chomsky 1995), movement cannot be optional, but is a last resort operation that is mostly driven by the need to check strong features in a local (specifier-head) configuration. In Merchant’s (2001) account of sluicing, the wh-phrase reaches [Spec, CP] throughwh-movement, which is driven by uninter-pretable features of thewh-phrase. Similarly, movement in fragments requires a trigger which the E feature cannot provide: Its syntax, as defined above, contains

10Elsewhere (Merchant 2004a: 703) he relates the movement operation that results in fragments to Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD, Cinque 1990) rather than to focus. See Section 2.4.3 for a discussion.

11The idea that FP is a focus projection is further developed by Gengel (2007), who argues ex-plicitly that movement in fragments occurs to check a [+contrastive] feature in [Spec, FP].

This conclusion might be too strong, since in languages like German or English fronting foci is possible yet marked. Specifically, as Weir (2014a) notes and I discuss in greater detail below, object DP fragments are acceptable in situations where fronting objects is definitely not.

only uninterpretable features that determine on which head it can appear. If FP was related to an information-structural concept such as focus or topic, an un-interpretable feature related to this notion could trigger movement in fragments independently from E, just like Merchant (2001) argues for sluicing.

From an empirical perspective, Merchant (2004a) requires evidence that frag-ments have actually moved. Since he analyzes movement in fragfrag-ments as regu-lar A’-movement, his theory predicts that the derivation of fragments is subject to movement restrictions that are observed in full sentences: Only those con-stituents that can be moved to [Spec, FP] and appear in a left-peripheral posi-tion in full sentences are predicted to be possible fragments. Merchant (2004a) presents introspective data from different phenomena and languages in support of this prediction, some of which will provide the testing ground for his theory in my experiments.¹²

However, Weir (2014a) shows that the assumption that structures presumably underlying movement and deletion are acceptable across the board is falsified even by simple examples such as (24). The short answer fragment in (24a) is fine despite the ungrammaticality of the presumably underlying fronting structure (24b). The acceptability of left dislocation in a sentence seems not to be necessar-ily related to the acceptability of the corresponding fragment.

(24) What did you eat? (Weir 2014a: 168)

a. Chips.

b. *Chips, I atet.

In order to account for such data while maintaining the idea of movement and deletion, Weir (2014a) claims that movement in fragments is a special type of movement which is restricted to elliptical utterances and which differs from movement in narrow syntax, i.e. before spell out. According to Weir, this ex-ceptional movement is triggered by a clash between the prosodic properties of focused expressions, which are marked with a pitch accent, and the ellipsis site, which the E feature requires to be silent. As Weir (2014a) assumes a similar un-derlying structure as Merchant (2004a) does (see Figure 2.2), that is, a regular sentence whose C head hosts the E feature, the TP is marked for PF-deletion, but still contains the focused DPJohn. This conflict is solved by moving the focused expression(s) out of the ellipsis site and adjoining them to CP.

Exceptional movement differs from narrow syntactic movement. First, it is not driven by feature checking; in fact, Weir (2014a: 195) denies that there is a focus

12See Section 2.4.4 for details.

feature in English.¹³According to Weir, exceptional movement is nevertheless a last resort operation, because there is no other way of saving the derivation from crashing due to the clash between focus and ellipsis at PF. Second, excep-tional movement has no effect on the semantics of the utterance. This is in line with the observation that, unlike Gengel (2007) suggests, fragments are not nec-essarily contrastive. Weir (2014a: 183) attributes the absence of semantic effects of exceptional movement to its application after spell-out and at PF only. He ar-gues that this also explains why it is restricted to elliptical utterances: The only purpose of exceptional movement is to evacuate focused constituents from the ellipsis site, and because focused constituents can remain in situ in full sentences, exceptional movement is ruled out by economy considerations.

As the discussion in Section 2.4.4 will show, the assumption of exceptional movement notably complicates the empirical evaluation of the movement and deletion account, because the strong correlation between the acceptability of fronting and fragments is no longer predicted. Therefore, the experiments pre-sented below test Merchant’s (2004a) version of the theory in the first place, but I also discuss the relevance for the exceptional movement theory whenever its predictions differ from Merchant (2004a).