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Unexpected in what way? The syntax of Dutch 'in what way' sluices| title | Unexpected in what way? The syntax of Dutch 'in what way' sluices |
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| start_date | 2025/05/23 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle Corbin (B1.661) |
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| summary | 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 (onverwacht ‘unexpected’ in (1)) and the wh-phrase in welk opzicht (‘in what way’) – hereafter “IWW-sluices”. The non-wh-phrase is typically repeated from the antecedent clause (i.e. identical to its correlate in the antecedent).
(1) A: Dat was onverwacht! B: Onverwacht in welk opzicht?
that was unexpected unexpected in what perspective
[‘A: That was unexpected! B: Unexpected in what way?’ ]
I first show that IWW-sluices display seemingly conflicting syntactic properties. On the one hand, IWW-sluices exhibit a wide range of connectivity effects, one of the “signature properties of ellipsis” (Yoshida et al. 2015:324). On the other hand, IWW-sluices can host (as the non-wh-remnants) elements that are normally not the target of certain syntactic operations.
In order to deal with all the properties of IWW-sluices, I propose that they correspond to two different underlying structures that undergo clausal ellipsis, viz. (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).
While the main focus of this presentation is on Dutch IWW-sluices, I also take a first glance at the crosslinguistic picture, with data from Spanish and Italian. Moreover, parallels are drawn to related elliptical constructions, such as Why-Stripping (Ortega-Santos et al. 2014, Yoshida et al. 2015). |
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| responsibles | NC |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2025/05/14 08:19 UTC |
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