P-stranding and pied-piping in minimalism

Merchant (2004a) leaves open the question of why P-stranding is possible in En-glish, but not in German. In Merchant (2001), he makes a tentative suggestion in terms of an analysis of prepositions as case markers, but the idea is not spelled out in detail. However, as I argued above, the processes underlying a movement restriction that is taken to support movement and deletion are not trivial, because they might also facilitate non-movement explanations for the data (which might also explain as well, but for independent reasons, why movement is blocked). In what follows, I briefly illustrate how the viability of specific accounts of frag-ments relies on the analysis that P-stranding/pied-piping itself receives.

Pied-piping is specifically problematic in minimalism, because in this frame-work movement is in general assumed to be a feature-driven last resort operation.

This implies that (i) movement is never optional (because it is the last resort to save derivations from crashing) and (ii) that the constituent that is moved hosts the feature that needs to be checked. However, in pied-piping not only this con-stituent itself, but a superordinate concon-stituent is moved, whichcontainsthe con-stituent hosting the feature. This is exemplified in Figure 3.4 forwh-movement in a question like (21): Not only thewh-phrase hosting the uninterpretable wh-feature, but the complete PP appears in [Spec, PP]. Unless exceptional movement (Weir 2014a) is assumed, which is not feature-driven, this concerns the genera-tion of fragments under the movement and delegenera-tion account, which needs to assume some kind of (probably focus-related) feature in order to motivate move-ment to [Spec, FP].

(21) For whom is the present?

CP

C’

TP is the presentt_i C^wh

PP_i DP^uwh whom^uwh P

for

Figure 3.4: Derivation of (21) under a pied-piping analysis. In this anal-ysis, only the DP hosts thewh-feature.

One possible solution to this problem is the assumption of feature percolation (Chomsky 1973, Grimshaw 2000). The idea is that under certain conditions syn-tactic features can ‘percolate’ to projections outside the maximal projection whose head hosts the feature. In (21), for instance, thewh-feature would perco-late to the PP level, so that the complete PP is marked [uwh] and must move to [Spec, CP]. As Figure 3.5 shows, technically speaking, under this analysis there is no pied-piping in the proper sense, because the PP as a whole just behaves like any otherwh-phrase. This idea has been explicitly applied to prepositional pied-piping inwh-questions (Trissler & Lutz 1992, Grimshaw 2000, Trissler 2000, Yoon 2001, Lasnik 2006, Sato 2011). As there is no reason to assume that a concept such as feature percolation is restricted towh-questions, it can be immediately applied to the movement operations that derive fragments according to Merchant’s the-ory. If movement in fragments is driven by some focus-related feature and the choice between P-stranding and pied-piping depends on whether this feature percolates to PP, the structures underlying P-stranding and pied-piping would only differ in whether the complete PP, or only the DP has the focus feature (22).

(22) a. This package is [for my father]_F. b. This package is for [my father]_F.

Now, if the preposition is obligatorily pied-piped for whatever reason (see the references below and footnote 23 for some hypotheses), this indicates that the focus structure licensing P-stranding, i.e. focusing the DP only, is not available in German (23). This pattern however is exactly what the in situ deletion account requires in order to explain the contrast between English and German. Since it assumes that only the non-focused parts of the utterance may be deleted, the ellipsis of the preposition is never licensed in German, because the correspond-ing focus structure (23b) is unavailable in this language. Taken together, if it

CP

C’

TP is the presentt_i C^wh

[For whom]^uwh_i

Figure 3.5: Derivation of (21) under a feature percolation analysis. In this analysis, the complete PP is marked as [+wh] as the result of fea-ture percolation.

is assumed that in such examples the PP is marked with the feature triggering movement, the movement and deletion account makes exactly the same predic-tion as in situ delepredic-tion and therefore does not gain larger explanatory power.

This holds for any version of the theory that assumes feature percolation.

(23) a. Das Päckchen ist [für meinen Vater]_F. b. *Das Päckchen ist für [meinen Vater]_F.

If the preposition omission data are taken to be evidence for movement, there must be a genuine movement restriction, which has no effect on the potential form of fragments if the PP remains in situ. Such a movement restriction could be the assumption that PP is an island for extraction in German, but not in English, as has been first suggested by van Riemsdijk (1978). In simplified terms, he argues that the preposition can be reanalyzed in English as forming a syntactic unit with the verb, so that it can be separated from the noun by movement.²¹More recently, Abels (2003) has picked up the idea of structural differences between the PP in languages that have and those that lack P-stranding. Abels argues that PP is a phase in German, but not in English. A phase can only be evacuated through its left edge, i.e. the specifier of the highest projection within this phase. From this perspective, extraction of the complement of P out of the PP is possible in English, but not in German, because it would have to be first moved to [Spec, PP]

in German.

21This also predicts an asymmetry between prepositional objects and adjuncts, because the prep-osition is subcategorized only in the case of the former. Pullum & Huddleston (2002) observe that indeed extraction out of adjunct PPs seems to be dispreferred as compared to prepositional objects. This is also empirically supported by my experiment 7, where the overall preference for omitting prepositions in short answers was reduced for adjunct PPs as compared to argu-ment PPs.

Movement of the complement of a phrase head to its specifier is not possible, because movement occurs only for feature checking purposes and features can be checked in a head-complement relation.²²

Such structural differences between the German and English PP might ex-plain why extraction out of the PP is blocked in German, but it does not exex-plain why the PP can be moved as a whole. Under the assumption of feature-driven movement, if feature percolation is ruled out, this approach requires an addi-tional explanation for why the PP can be moved as a whole in case extraction is not possible. This could be modeled by integrating optimality-theoretic vio-lable constraints on locality in the minimalist framework, as Heck (2008) sug-gests, but such additional assumptions clearly complicate the overall theoretical framework. The phase-based account is also compatible with Weir’s (2014a) as-sumption of exceptional movement. Weir’s account in principle requires fronting the focused phrase in order to evacuate it from the ellipsis site, but according to the theory, it can carry along “any material which it might need to pied-pipe”

(Weir 2014a: 186). If the complement of the preposition cannot be extracted for independent reasons in languages which, like German, do not have P-stranding, pied-piping saves the derivation from crashing. Recall that this movement occurs only for PF reasons, specifically, the incompatibility of the pitch accent marking focus with ellipsis. The fact that the fragment is focused does not imply the ex-istence a focus feature that needs to be checked, hence Weir does not need to assume feature percolation.

22In a later version of his theory, Abels (2012) argues that PP is always a phase. In this theory, the preposition is the head of the phase, which can be evacuated only through its edge, [Spec, PP]. The complement of P can never be moved to this position, because movement must be triggered by feature checking requirements in minimalism. The complement is already in a local configuration with the P head that allows for feature checking, so that no movement is required and consequently licensed. Abels (2012: 245–268) argues that the critical difference between languages that allow P-stranding and those that do not is that the former involve additional structure (a projection headed by an empty morpheme) between the preposition and the DP. Consequently, this morpheme, but not the DP is the complement of P. Under this analysis, P-stranding involves movement out of a more deeply embedded position within the PP, which is also available in languages without P-stranding, like German (i). Abels motivates the assumption of the empty morpheme in languages that do not have P-stranding with the argument that it has overt counterparts in some languages.

(i) Was

‘What (kind of books) have you read?’

(Abels 2012: 255)

The brief discussion in this section showed that the theoretical analysis of P-stranding and pied-piping²³determines whether the correlation between prepo-sition omission and P-stranding in fragments evidences a movement restriction or whether it is expected under non-movement accounts as well. Advocates of movement and deletion would have to commit to one of these analyses but as for now there is no consensus about which of the analyses discussed so far is correct.

The picture becomes even more complicated when the difference between accept-able and unacceptaccept-able instances of P-strandingwithin a P-stranding language (see footnote 27 below for English) is taken into account. Finally, if the avail-ability of P-stranding and preposition omission in fragments is attributed to a structural difference between English and German PPs, the apparent optionality of P-stranding in contexts that allow for it in English also calls for an explanation, because in minimalism syntactic operations are not optional. Consequently, be-fore interpreting the P-stranding generalization as evidence for movement, there should be a more explicit account of pied-piping and P-stranding.

Solving this intricate theoretical problem is beyond the scope of this work. The discussion in this section showed that if pied-piping is explained through feature percolation or when the structured propositions approach by Reich (2002a) (see Section 3.2.5.1.1) is pursued, movement and deletion and in situ deletion make the same empirical predictions. However, it also showed that if feature percolation is rejected and the PSG is explained with a ban on extraction out of PPs in German, as suggested by Abels (2003, 2012), the PSG provides evidence for the movement and deletion account. Therefore, in what follows I investigate first whether the general pattern that the PSG predicts for fragments holds in German and English (experiments 4 and 5), before I explore potential non-movement explanations for the data. If the pattern found in experiments 4 and 5 can be explained without the assumption of movement, the assumption of the additional movement step is empirically unmotivated. Experiment 6 tests a hypothesis that has been first mentioned in Barton & Progovac (2005), who attribute the impossibility of omit-ting the preposition in German to its involvement in prepositional case checking.

This prediction is not borne out. Experiment 7 provides evidence for a nonsyn-tactic parallelism between question and answer, which can be accounted for in terms of processing (Levelt & Kelter 1982, Nykiel 2017) or a structured proposi-tion analysis of quesproposi-tion semantics (Reich 2002a, 2007).

23Besides the accounts referred to so far, among the syntactic accounts, Sato (2011) assumes that in German PPs, but not in English ones, the determiner in D is head-moved to P. Other researchers, as Tokizaki (2010) and Philippova (2014), claim that P-stranding is never syntacti-cally blocked, but ruled out when it yields prosodisyntacti-cally ill-formed structures.

3.2.2 Experiment 4: Preposition omission in German