Preposition stranding and ellipsis alternation

• Published in: English language and linguistics Vol. 21; no. 1; pp. 27 - 45
• Main Author: NYKIEL, JOANNA
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.03.2017
• Subjects: Antecedents; Clauses; Ellipsis; English language; Grammar; Grammatical subject; Linguistics; Phrases; Prepositional phrases; Syntactic anaphora; Syntactic movement; Syntactic structures; New York; United States > US; Chicago Illinois
• ISSN: 1360-6743; 1469-4379
• DOI: 10.1017/S1360674315000477

Ellipsis alternation refers here to the alternation between two kinds of ellipsis remnants whose correlates are prepositional phrases. One kind of remnant includes the preposition hosted by its correlate and the other doesn't. This alternation is now known to be cross-linguistically widespread although it was originally assumed to be banned in languages without preposition stranding under wh-movement. I argue that there is a nonsyntactic relationship between ellipsis alternation and preposition stranding that helps explain the availability and distribution of both types of remnants in terms of general performance preferences. Two pieces of corpus evidence from English are offered in support of this argument. The first piece of evidence reveals that the content of a remnant and its correlate affects ellipsis alternation both in languages without preposition stranding and in English. The second piece of evidence shows that the availability of preposition stranding in English nonelliptical clauses supports the use of prepositionless remnants via structural persistence, that is, reuse of syntactic structure found in antecedent clauses. These data lead me to conclude that ellipsis alternation is subject to a stronger processing constraint in English than in languages without preposition stranding.