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

titleWeird in what way? On the syntax of Dutch `in what way’ sluices
start_date2023/06/07
schedule15h-17h
onlineno
location_info/
summaryIn 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).
responsiblesJardine