Linguistics Seminar Talk - Tanja Temmerman

Weird in what way?
On the syntax of Dutch `in what way’ sluices

In this talk, I examine the syntax of seemingly non-sentential questions such as (1) in Dutch, involving the combination of a non-wh-phrase (vreemd ‘weird’ in (1)) and the wh-phrase in welk opzicht (‘in what way’) – hereafter IWW-sluicing. The non-wh-remnant is ‘repeated from’ the antecedent clause.

(1)          A:           Dit         is            vreemd.                              B:           Vreemd              in            welk      opzicht?

                                this       is            weird                                                    weird                    in            what     perspective         

[‘A: This is weird. B: Weird in what way?’ ]

I first show that IWW-sluices display conflicting syntactic properties. On the one hand, IWW-sluices exhibit a wide range of connectivity effects. On the other hand, IWW-sluices can host (as the non-wh-remnants) elements that are normally not the target of certain syntactic operations (such as movement).

In order to deal with all the properties of IWW-sluices, I propose that they correspond to 2 different underlying structures that undergo clausal ellipsis, i.e. (i) a left dislocation structure and (ii) a short quotative source. I also argue against an in situ analysis (i.e. with clausal ellipsis in an echo-like question) for IWW-sluicing.

While the main focus of this presentation is on IWW-sluicing in Dutch, I also take a first glance at the crosslinguistic picture, with data from Spanish and Italian.  Moreover, parallels are drawn to related elliptical constructions (mainly in Dutch), i.e. other cases of so-called “Sweeping”, such as Why-Stripping (Ortega-Santos et al. 2014, Yoshida et al. 2015) and Spading (van Craenenbroeck 2004).