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The syntax of Dutch embedded fragment answers: on the PF-theory of islands and the wh/sluicing correlation

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Abstract

This paper presents new evidence in favour of Merchant’s (2004, 2008) PF-theory of islands, which states that island-sensitivity is due to the presence of PF-uninterpretable traces at PF. This new evidence is provided by two types of Dutch embedded fragment answers: whereas one type is island-sensitive, the other one is not. The former differs from the latter in that it involves an extra movement step, leaving an extra trace. Moreover, this paper argues that the wh/sluicing correlation (van Craenenbroeck and Lipták 2006, 2009) makes the correct predictions regarding the (non-)embeddability of fragment answers in Dutch and English. The wh/sluicing correlation states that there is a correlation between the type of wh-movement a language exhibits and the types of clausal ellipsis attested in that language. I show that it follows straightforwardly that, unlike in Dutch, embedded fragment answers are not attested in English.

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Notes

  1. Barbiers (2000, 2002) and Merchant (2004), amongst others, argue that the fronting of the fragment preceding TP-ellipsis is focus-movement. This is discussed in more detail in Sects. 3 and 4.

  2. Sluiced wh-phrases and fragment answers are thus not considered to have a syntactic structure which simply consists of the remnant’s own phrasal projection (exclusive of any sentential material), unlike in non-structural (or direct interpretation) approaches to ellipsis (e.g., Van Riemsdijk 1978; Barton 1990, 2006; Stainton 1997, 1998; Ginzburg and Sag 2000; Culicover and Jackendoff 2005).

  3. Some of these connectivity effects will be elaborated upon in Sect. 3, where the properties of Dutch embedded fragment answers are introduced.

  4. TP-ellipsis is presumably triggered by its sister, the Co-head. At this point, I will not be going into the specifics of the syntactic triggering of ellipsis (cf. Lobeck 1995; Merchant 2001; Aelbrecht 2009; etc. for numerous possible implementations). I return to this in Sect. 4.

  5. In sluicing (cf. (2a)), a wh-phrase (carrying a [wh]- and [Q]-feature) moves to the left periphery in order to check a feature on the \(\mathrm{C}^{\mathrm{o}}_{[\mathrm{wh},\mathrm{Q}]}\)-head of constituent questions, after which TP is elided (cf. Merchant 2001, 2008). The movement involved in fragments (cf. (2b)) is not wh-movement, but focus movement (cf. also Barbiers 2000, 2002; Merchant 2004): a phrase carrying a [Foc]-feature moves to check the matching feature on Co. For more details on the features involved in sluicing and fragments, see Sects. 3 and 4.

  6. In the examples given below, stress is marked with small caps.

  7. Note that the full sentential counterpart of the fragment answers in (3a) and (3b) is grammatical, as shown in the a-examples in (i) and (ii), respectively. The b-examples demonstrate that, when the fragment is moved out of the island, the full sentential counterparts are ungrammatical.

    • figure b

  8. Ross’ (1969:276–7) original claim was not that sluicing completely eliminates the effect of island. Rather, he claimed that sluicing improves island violations. However, this was strengthened in later work by other authors (cf. van Craenenbroeck 2010:269; Merchant 2001:Chap. 3 for discussion and references).

  9. At least, for certain types of sluicing. The ‘contrast’ sluices discussed in Merchant (2001, 2008, 2009), for example, do show locality effects.

    • figure d

  10. See Wang (2006) for how to rule out ‘small TP deletion’ (i.e., deletion of a TP which doesn’t include the island) in island-insensitive sluices.

  11. Not all types of island violations can be rescued by phonological deletion of the offending structure. Sauerland (1996) points out that the remediation of islands by sluicing only applies to strong islands, not to weak ones. This suggests that only strong island violations cause the derivation to crash at PF, while violations of weak islands induce an LF-crash (cf. also Szabolcsi and Zwarts 1993).

  12. The ‘*’-placing procedure violates the Inclusiveness Condition (cf. Kitahara 1999; Lasnik 2001b; Fortin 2010). Lasnik (2001b:313; fn. 9) proposes the following alternative: “Instead of * being added, imagine that every phrase is marked with √ ‘at birth’. Then, when an island violation occurs, the √ is erased. The […] (PF) violation would then be signaled by lack of √ rather than by *.”

  13. This suggests that the conception of the PF-interface as a complex branch (cf. e.g., Embick and Noyer 2001; Grohmann 2007, 2008), with PF-operations ordered with respect to each other, is on the right track. Apparently, ellipsis (PF-deletion) has to apply before PF starts to parse (and delete) copies. Note also that ‘regular’ deletion of copies in a chain (the operation Chain Reduction of Nunes 2004) does not suffice to eliminate defective island-violating copies and to stop PF from crashing.

  14. It should be noted that the (pronounced) highest link of an A′-movement chain does not cause PF to crash. If this were the case, sluicing would still be predicted to show island sensitivity, as the highest copy is never erased by ellipsis. Merchant (2004:709, 2008:144–145) presents three possible explanations for why the highest chain link no longer has a PF-uninterpretable feature. Each of these has clear implications for the workings of the syntax-phonology interface. I refer the reader to Merchant (2004, 2008) for the details, and leave a more elaborated discussion of the PF-branch for further research.

  15. Merchant (2004) neutrally labels the highest layer in the left periphery of fragments ‘FP’, the head of which selects CP. I simply make use of two indistinct Co-heads here.

  16. Here and throughout the rest of the paper, the percentage sign indicates that not all native speakers of Dutch accept this type of fragment answer.

  17. In (13), English examples are given, but the same restrictions hold for Dutch parentheticals.

  18. Restriction (IV) is not mentioned in Rooryck (2001), but was suggested to me by Johan Rooryck (p.c.).

  19. Some speakers disallow the nominative marked pronoun hij ‘he’ in examples such as (A2) in (19) and prefer the accusative marked pronoun hem ‘him’ (especially speakers of dialects in which embedded fragments of this type are degraded). Note that verbs like denken ‘think’ can also simply take a DP direct object, which precedes the main verb when there is an auxiliary, cf. (i). This might be a confounding factor in the judgements of examples like this one. In any case, most importantly, several speakers (for whom (A2)-type answers are perfectly fine) do allow for the nominative marked pronoun hij ‘he’ in (A2) in (19).

    • figure r

  20. Dutch does allow so-called topic drop, but crucially, the topic has to occupy the initial position of a main (not a subordinate) clause (cf. e.g., Ackema et al. 2006; Neeleman and Szendrői 2007).

  21. A more precise formulation is: Dutch is a ‘partial preposition-stranding language’, as it does allow preposition stranding in a few very specific contexts. Dutch prepositions can be stranded by R-pronouns (e.g., waar ‘where’, daar ‘there’), empty operators, and complex wh-phrases (e.g., welke jongen ‘which boy’), cf. van Riemsdijk (1978) and van Craenenbroeck (2010).

  22. Some caveats are in order for Dutch. Some native speakers of Dutch do accept the DP-fragment answers in (21). These speakers also generally allow preposition-stranding under A′-movement (and thus accept, for instance, the preposition-stranding version of the question in (21)). The fact that preposition stranding under A′-movement is normatively rejected could have a significant influence on the reported judgements (Merchant 2001:95).

  23. For more arguments why the PP(-object) does not occupy the A-position [SpecTP] in Dutch, cf. Law (2006).

  24. In arguing against the existence of locative inversion in Dutch, Broekhuis (2008:303–4) explicitly takes issue with Zwart’s (1992) arguments to the opposite effect.

  25. Thanks to an anonymous NLLT reviewer for pointing this out.

  26. While the complement of a factive verb is presupposed to be true, this is not the case for the complement of propositional attitude verbs. Response stance complements seem to be an ‘intermediate’ category: like propositional complements, their truth is not presupposed. (They “must be under debate” (Drubig 2000)), but syntactically—for instance, with respect to islandhood—they behave like factive complements. More on the distinction propositional attitude verb / factive verb / response stance verb can be found in Kiparsky and Kiparsky (1970), Cattell (1978), and Hegarty (1992).

  27. Some of the verbs that cannot co-occur with an embedded fragment answer, such as weten ‘know’, can form part of a parenthetical, cf. (i). This is an additional argument against a parenthetical analysis of Dutch embedded fragments (cf. Sect. 3.1).

    • figure w

  28. Thanks to an anonymous NLLT reviewer for raising this issue.

  29. Hoekstra (1991) and Hoeksema (2000) note that in certain contexts, fronting an indefinite containing the NPI-adverb ook maar ‘even’ is acceptable, cf. (i). Why this is so is beyond the scope of this paper. Relevant here is that in those cases where the NPI can be fronted, it is also licensed as a fragment, cf. (ii). This is, of course, entirely predicted under the current analysis.

    • figure ac

  30. Note that the full sentential counterpart of the fragment answers in (35) and (36) is grammatical, as shown in the a-examples in (i) and (ii), respectively. The b-examples demonstrate that, when the fragment-to-be is moved out of the island, the full sentential counterparts are ungrammatical.

    • figure ak

  31. In sluicing, the Co-head to the immediate right of the wh-phrase—i.e., the one triggering ellipsis of its TP-complement, cf. Lobeck (1995), Merchant (2001)—always has to remain empty (cf. Merchant 2001; cf. Baltin 2010 and Thoms 2010 for a different point of view), even in doubly-filled-comp-violating languages such as various Dutch dialects, cf. (i).

    • figure ao

    Similarly, in embedded fragment answers in Dutch, the Co-head always remains empty: although non-elliptical subordinate clauses in Dutch require the presence of dat ‘that’, this complementizer is obligatorily absent in embedded fragment answers. This contrast is illustrated in (ii). If Dutch embedded fragment answers are the non-wh-counterpart of sluicing, this parallel state of affairs is expected.

    • figure ap

  32. Note that the full sentential counterpart of (25Aa) is ungrammatical, as shown in (i).

    • figure ar

  33. Chomsky’s (1995:Chap. 4) argument is based on the observation that the finite forms of the auxiliaries be and have must raise to To in overt syntax, despite the fact that the [V]-feature of To is arguably weak in English. Chomsky (1995:Chap. 4) derives the necessity of overt syntactic movement in this particular case from the assumption that these auxiliaries are LF-invisible, and hence cannot undergo covert movement. Thanks to Marcel den Dikken (p.c.) for pointing this out to me.

  34. The only two movement chains resulting in a well-formed PF-object are: (i) single-membered chains (here, PF always receives an unambiguous instruction, cf. (43a)), and (ii) chains in which a single strong feature is checked (here, the copy in the feature-checking relation is spelled out, cf. (43b)).

  35. The ellipsis cases discussed by Richards (1997, 2001) are multiple sluicing and gapping.

  36. Belletti (2004) and Aboh (2006), amongst others, propose that the vP-periphery includes a Focus projection.

  37. According to Barbiers (2002), focus-movement to the matrix vP-layer occurs in one fell swoop, i.e., from vP to vP, without an intermediate landing site in [SpecCP]. However, if this were the case, clausal ellipsis would eliminate all *-traces, resulting in island insensitivity, contrary to fact.

  38. Barbiers (2000, 2002) analyzes embedded fragments of type 2 as involving PF-deletion of the entire embedded CP (instead of ellipsis of the embedded TP). This is, however, unlikely, as an operation of ellipsis targeting an entire complement CP has been argued not to exist (cf. Hankamer 1971; Lobeck 1995; Kennedy and Merchant 2000; Merchant 2001). This also holds for Dutch, cf. (i).

    • figure ax

    Dutch does exhibit Modal Complement Ellipsis (Aelbrecht 2009), cf. (ii), but Aelbrecht (2009:37ff) argues extensively that the complement of a modal in Dutch is not a CP. I refer the reader to Aelbrecht’s work for details.

    • figure ay

  39. The question arises why, in the derivation of type 2 fragments, the distance between the landing site of the moved phrase and the ellipsis site is quite extended. A possible explanation could be provided by Aelbrecht (2009), who proposes that ellipsis licensing takes place under Agree, hence, at a distance. Note also that these facts are at first glance problematic for an analysis like Thoms (2010), where ellipsis licensing is conceived of as deletion of the complement of the moved phrase. I leave this issue to further research.

  40. As already shown in footnote 33, the full sentential counterpart of (25Ab) is ungrammatical as well, cf. (i).

    • figure bb

  41. Thanks to Marcel den Dikken (p.c.) for suggesting this to me.

  42. Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (p.c.) notes that the difference between (ia) and (ib) confirms that negation in an embedded clause cannot license an NPI that has moved into the matrix clause. In (ia) and (ib), the NPI de eerste de beste ‘just anyone’ has moved from within the embedded clause to the matrix [SpecCP]. In the grammatical example (ia), the matrix negation licenses the fronted NPI. In the degraded example (ib), the embedded negation is too far removed from the fronted NPI and fails to license it.

    • figure bc

  43. Regarding the sluicing and VP-ellipsis examples in (5), there is another account available in the literature. Fox and Lasnik (2003) [F&L] propose an analysis based on certain interactions of Parallelism and the locality of movement. In the examples in (5), the correlate in the antecedent clauses is an indefinite, which does not move, but is bound by existential closure (cf. Reinhart 1997). A Parallelism condition on ellipsis then forces wh-movement in the elliptical clauses to take place in one fell swoop. Only in that case are the variables in the elliptical clause and those in its antecedent bound from exactly parallel syntactic positions (the idea being that intermediate landing sites would introduce additional variables and concomitant binders and hence a violation of Parallelism). However, as F&L adhere to the idea that all maximal projections are potential barriers, movement has to take place successive cyclically; i.e., it has to adjoin to every intermediate projection. If it skips any intermediate projections, these projections become islands. F&L propose that ellipsis can repair island violations if every intermediate projection skipped (i.e., every island) is deleted. In the sentences in (5), Parallelism forces one-fell-swoop movement. In the case of sluicing (5a), ellipsis deletes every skipped projection, resulting in grammaticality. VP-ellipsis (5b), on the other hand, deletes a smaller constituent and some skipped projections remain unelided. Hence, the ungrammaticality of (5b) is either due to a violation of Parallelism or to (non-repaired) violation of the locality of movement. I refer the reader to the original paper for more details.

    An anonymous NLLT reviewer raises the question of how the Dutch embedded fragments would fare under the F&L account. At first sight, the F&L analysis seems to make the same predictions as a Merchant-type account regarding the island sensitivity of the two types of Dutch embedded fragments. While in the case of type 1 fragments, every intermediate projection is elided and hence no island violation ensues, some skipped projections (e.g., CP) will not be deleted in the case of type 2 fragments. The F&L account thus correctly predicts island insensitivity for the former and island sensitivity for the latter. That said, however, the embedded fragment examples discussed here crucially differ from the sluicing and VP-ellipsis examples of F&L in not having indefinites, but rather, focused phrases as their correlates (see e.g., (36)). Park (2005, 2010) and Merchant (2008), amongst others, have shown that focused XPs and indefinites scope differently. Park follows Rooth (1985) in assuming that focused phrases do not move at LF; Merchant takes island-escaping LF focus movement to be “crippled”; i.e., it cannot target the IP or CP, but is limited to VP. Either way, it seems that because of these different scope properties, the level of Parallelism aimed at by F&L cannot be attained in the relevant fragment examples. Accordingly, this Parallelism cannot be adopted to predict or explain island sensitivity in examples such as (36).

  44. The general idea of the division of labor between the 2 CPs is reminiscent of Reinhart’s (1981) account. CP1 and CP2 are most closely related to ForceP and FocP, respectively, in the Rizzian left periphery (cf. Rizzi 1997 et seq.), as explicitly acknowledged in van Craenenbroeck (2010:32).

  45. For Sabel (2000) and den Dikken (2003), the [+Op]-feature checked by wh-movement is [+Foc]. Sabel (2000) presents ample cross-linguistic evidence that wh-movement is in fact also an instance of focus-movement. The exact nature of the [+Op]-feature involved in wh-movement is irrelevant for my purposes; the only thing crucial is that there is some operator feature that needs to be checked. Furthermore, Sabel (2000) and den Dikken (2003) analyze wh-movement as involving a [+wh]-feature instead of a [+Q]-feature. Presumably, there is no problem in reformulating what follows in terms of the [+wh]-feature. I prefer to use the [+Q]-feature, as this seems more closely related to the notion ‘clause-typing’.

  46. According to van Craenenbroeck (2009, 2010, 2012), this only holds for simple wh-phrases, not for complex ones. Here, I disregard complex wh-constituents and only focus on the simple ones.

  47. For a brief illustration of the two empirical arguments given by den Dikken and Giannakidou (2002) and den Dikken (2003), cf. infra, p. 44–45.

  48. There is some discussion as to whether the [+Op]-feature on \(\mathrm{C}_{2}^{\mathrm{o}}\) is strong in case the [+Q]-feature on \(\mathrm{C}_{1}^{\mathrm{o}}\) is strong, cf. van Craenenbroeck (2010:89). Even if the [+Op]-feature on \(\mathrm{C}_{2}^{\mathrm{o}}\) is weak in this case, the consequences of the wh/sluicing correlation for clausal ellipsis discussed below still hold.

  49. Although movement from [SpecCP2] to [SpecCP1] starts out from a position in which an operator-variable chain was created, Bošković’s (2008) Operator Freezing Effect (cf. Sect. 3.4.2) is not relevant here, as the landing site is not an operator position (but related to clause typing).

  50. The option with the wh-constituent occurring to the left of the complementizer of ‘if’ is also available in these dialects (cf. van Craenenbroeck 2009, 2010, 2012).

  51. Following a suggestion by van Craenenbroeck (2010:258, fn. 6), I formulate the overt/covert asymmetry in terms of a difference in feature strength. Van Craenenbroeck (2009:3, fn. 2), on the other hand, suggests that the covertness of the final movement step could be linked to the Vacuous Movement Hypothesis (cf. e.g., Agbayani 2000): the movement is ‘local enough’ for it to take place without its phonetic matrix.

  52. Strictly speaking, the sluice in (63b) could also be the result of TP-ellipsis. In those variants of Dutch that do not allow the wh-phrase and the overt complementizer of ‘if’ to surface together, there is no way of telling whether in (63b) or (i) is the derivation of en daarom vraag ik me af waarom ‘and therefore, I wonder why.’

    • figure bm

  53. Focus-movement is taken to be triggered by a syntactic (formal) feature [+Foc] or, more generally, [+Op] in Horvath (1986, 2007), Bródy (1995), Rizzi (1997), den Dikken (2003), and van Craenenbroeck and Lipták (2006, 2009), amongst others.

  54. There is no clause-typing feature that needs to be checked: declaratives are the unmarked (‘default’) clause type (Sadock and Zwicky 1985; Payne 1997).

  55. There is a general consensus in the literature (Culicover 1991; Authier 1992; den Dikken 2003) that the complementizer that in English (cf. (64)) occupies the highest Co-head (labelled Co by these authors, here: \(\mathrm{C}_{1}^{\mathrm{o}}\)).

  56. In fact, if there is only focus movement into the left periphery (i.e., to [SpecCP2]), there will be no CP2-ellipsis in the first place: as the [+Q]-feature of [e] remains unchecked, [e] is not fully licensed and cannot trigger ellipsis.

  57. A similar analysis of English wh-movement in root and embedded clauses can be found in Culicover (1991).

  58. According to den Dikken (2003:91–2), the [+Q] feature on \(\mathrm{C}_{1}^{\mathrm{o}}\) is always strong in English. He attributes the observation that a wh-phrase does not move overtly to [SpecCP1] in a root wh-question to the fact that [+Q] is on the root node itself. He posits, following a hypothesis due to Chomsky (1995:Chap. 4), that no feature on the root C ever needs to be checked via overt movement: the features of the root node are not ‘active’ in overt syntax. This is not incompatible with my account based on the wh/sluicing correlation (although the latter may then need to be rephrased in terms of ‘overt movement’ instead of ‘strong features’). For expository purposes, though, I simply consider the [+Q] feature on \(\mathrm{C}_{1}^{\mathrm{o}}\) in English root clauses to be weak.

  59. Note that under this account, the island sensitivity of English fragment answers (cf. Sect. 2) still remains unexplained. Fragments are generated on the basis of a ‘regular’ focus movement structure, with the focus phrase targeting [SpecCP2], after which TP is elided. As such, TP-ellipsis will delete all *-marked traces, which predicts island-insensitivity, contrary to fact. Thus, we still need to assume—following Merchant (2004)—that English root fragments involve a left dislocation structure, which leaves a (non-deleted) trace in [SpecCP2].

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Acknowledgements

I am very thankful to Hans Broekhuis for suggesting that Dutch embedded fragments could be an interesting research topic. Without him, this paper probably would not have been written. Furthermore, I am grateful for the encouragement and the valuable comments and suggestions of Johan Rooryck, Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, Jason Merchant, Sjef Barbiers, Kyle Johnson, Peter Svenonius, Marcel den Dikken, Marjo Van Koppen, Norbert Corver, Bettina Gruber, Andrés Saab, Erik Schoorlemmer, Anikó Lipták, Gary Thoms, Eefje Boef, Liliane Haegeman, Lobke Aelbrecht, the audiences of the TIN-day 2009 (Utrecht), the 24th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (Brussels), the 4th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics, ConSOLE XVIII (Barcelona), the 28th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (Los Angeles), and the 33rd GLOW Colloquium (Wroclaw), and the anonymous NLLT reviewers. All errors and shortcomings are my own.

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    Tanja Temmerman

  2. Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 43 Boulevard du Jardin botanique, 1000, Brussels, Belgium

    Tanja Temmerman

  3. CRISSP/Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Stormstraat 2, 1000, Brussels, Belgium

    Tanja Temmerman

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Temmerman, T. The syntax of Dutch embedded fragment answers: on the PF-theory of islands and the wh/sluicing correlation. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 31, 235–285 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9180-6

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