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Fragment answers and movement

A superlative argument

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Abstract

The nature of fragment answers has been under debate for the past 40 years. Most of the arguments have focused on the mobility and island-(in)sensitivity of the fragments. This paper offers a new empirical domain of investigation: interpretative differences between fragment answers and their full sentence counterparts. I present data regarding an interpretation of superlative expressions that is available only with overt movement but not covert movement, and show that fragment answers allow the reading while their full sentence counterparts do not. Thus I argue that in some cases fragment answers must involve movement in the narrow syntax. Approaches to fragment answers that exclusively involve PF movement of the fragments or in situ fragment answers are challenged.

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Notes

  1. See fn. 13 for a brief discussion of approaches that do not involve underlying structures.

  2. Nishigauchi and Fujii (2006) made a case of this nature which involves an interpretation of Japanese anaphora that is possible in clefts and fragment answers but not in full answers.

  3. Note that here I modified Szabolczi’s original examples ‘take the best picture of’ to ‘take the largest photo of.’ The motivation for this change is that the sentences that allow the Rin also allow the absolute reading. To make sure the Rin is being probed, the sentences need to be judged under an unambiguous scenario where the absolute reading is false and the Rin is true (as in Fig. 1). Such scenarios work the best when concrete properties (e.g. sizes of the photos) are being compared rather than abstract or subjective properties (e.g. goodness of the photos).

  4. If not specified otherwise, the judgements reported in this paper come from a survey I conducted with seven native English speakers including North American, British, and Trinidad and Tobago varieties of English. If not specified, all seven speakers agree on the judgements.

  5. The relevant foci are Ben in (9a), who in (9b) and (9d), and the boy in (9c).

  6. As Shen (2015) and an NLLT reviewer pointed out, topicalization of Ben does not make the Rin possible in (i). This is expected because the semantics of the Rin requires Ben to be the focus. Since an element that bears focus cannot be topic at the same time, topicalization does not make the Rin available. See Pancheva and Tomaszewicz (2012) and discussion following (11) for the semantics of the Rin.

    1. i.

      Ben, Sally took the largest photo of. (# Rin)

  7. Thanks to Patrick Elliott for pointing this out.

  8. The syntactic identity theories of ellipsis have been argued for in Chomsky (1965), Ross (1967), Sag (1976), Chung et al. (1995), Lasnik (1995), Fox (2000), Tomioka (2008), Merchant (2013a) among others.

  9. For semantic identity theories, see Ginzburg and Sag (2000), Merchant (2001, 2004), Reich (2007), AnderBois (2011), Barker (2013), Weir (2014), Barros (2014). For hybrid theories, see Rooth (1992), Chung and Ladusaw (2006), Chung (2013), Merchant (2008), van Craenenbroeck (2012), Merchant (2013b).

  10. Note that ‘a photo of no one’ can be interpreted to mean a blank photo. This interpretation is not relevant to the current discussion.

  11. In what follows, I use the in situ approach for demonstration. The alternative source argument as well as the upcoming argument against it also goes to the PF movement approach.

  12. Note the judgements of (25) involving reciprocals are less clear than those of (21) and (22) involving negative quantifiers. That being said, at least four native English speakers in my survey showed the reported judgements.

  13. Note that the argument presented here is an argument for movement (in particular, for movement in the narrow syntax), not one for deletion. Apart from the approaches to fragment answers discussed so far, there is a non-movement, non-deletion approach in the literature (see Riemsdijk 1978; Ginzburg and Sag 2000; Stainton 2006; Valmala 2007; Jacobson 2016). In this approach, fragment answers do not have an underlying full-sentence structure. Under this approach, the fragment answer trivially allows the Rin as long as the question allows it due the question-answer congruence conditions. Thus the existence of the Rin is not an argument for or against the non-deletion approach. See Merchant (2004) for arguments against this approach.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Susi Wurmbrand, Jonathan Bobaljik, Željko Bošković, Jon Gajewski, Jason Merchant, Troy Messick, Ian Roberts, Marcin Dadan, three anonymous reviewers and the managing editor Jason Merchant at NLLT for their insightful comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of this work were presented at Ling Lunch at University of Connecticut (2015), the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain, and the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Thanks to the reviewers and audience at these conferences especially Klaus Abels, Patrick David Elliott, and Andrew Weir for valuable comments. I also thank all the native speakers who have provided me with their judgements. All errors are mine.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, 365 Fairfield Way, Unit 1145, Storrs, CT, 06269-1145, USA

    Zheng Shen

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Shen, Z. Fragment answers and movement. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 36, 309–321 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-017-9369-9

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