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Ellipsis in split questions

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Abstract

Split questions such as What tree did John plant, an oak? contain a wh-question part and a tag. Drawing on Spanish, Basque and English data, this article argues that these two parts of a split question are independent clauses. The tag is in fact an elliptical non-wh-question, where ellipsis is licensed in the same way as in other sentence fragments. I provide detailed argumentation that the tag involves movement of a correlate of the wh-phrase, followed by ellipsis of the remnant, thus contributing to the growing body of evidence that sentence fragments (sluicing, fragment answers, etc.) are syntactically full clauses. The syntax proposed provides a simple account of the intonation patterns found in split questions and of their semantics. Furthermore, it is argued that the only existing alternative analysis of split questions cannot account for many of the properties of this construction.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1010 E 59th St, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA

    Karlos Arregi

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Correspondence to Karlos Arregi.

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I would like to thank José Camacho, Ángel Gallego, Peter Lasersohn, Jason Merchant, Marcel den Dikken, and three anonymous NLLT reviewers for very helpful criticism and discussion. I would also like to thank Ikuska Ansola-Badiola for her Basque and Spanish judgments and for her sharp nonlinguist intuitions about both languages. Early versions of this work were presented at the 36th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages in Rutgers University in 2006 and at the Bilbao-Deusto Student Conference in Linguistics in 2006. Audiences at both events were very helpful with their comments. I alone am to blame for any errors found in this article.

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Arregi, K. Ellipsis in split questions. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 28, 539–592 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-010-9097-x

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