Resumption as a sluicing source in Saudi Arabic: Evidence from sluicing with prepositional phrases

Abstract

This paper reports the results of three acceptability judgment experiments on Saudi Arabic elliptical questions (sluicing) with prepositional phrases. We show that in standard cases of merger type sluicing and contrastive sluicing there is no penalty for leaving out the preposition. Under an analysis of sluicing with syntactic identity between antecedent and ellipsis site, such examples require preposition stranding in the ellipsis site. We call this pattern OPUS, which the reader is invited to interpret as an abbreviation, depending on their theoretical predilections, as Ostensible P-stranding Under Sluicing or as Omission of Preposition Under Sluicing. Our findings show that Saudi Arabic violates Merchant’s (2001) second form identity generalization. Further experiments reveal that the status of the examples depends on the status of the most acceptable synonymous source within the ellipsis site; in particular, when neither a cleft structure nor a resumptive structure are grammatically available in the ellipsis site, the acceptability of OPUS decays. We interpret this as evidence that there is syntactic structure at the ellipsis site and that the wh-remnant in these elliptical questions can – and sometimes must – relate to a resumptive pronoun in the ellipsis site.