Linguistics Seminar Talk - Tanja Temmerman
07 June 2023, 3:00 pm–5:00 pm
Weird in what way? On the syntax of Dutch `in what way’ sluices
Event Information
Open to
- All
Organiser
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Richard Jardine – UCL Linguistics
Location
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Lecture Theatre 118, Chandler HouseChandler House2 Wakefield StreetLondonWC1N 1PFUnited Kingdom
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).
About the Speaker
Tanja Temmerman
Assistant Professor at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles
More about Tanja Temmerman