Relative pronouns as sluicing remnants

This paper demonstrates on the basis of novel data from Hungarian that contrary to received opinion, sluicing is possible inside relative clauses. It shows that sluicing can affect a relative clause to the exclusion of its relative pronoun in headless or headed relatives that can be considered non-canonical free choice expressions. In sluicing, the relative pronoun that gets stranded in the ellipsis process furthermore bears the major stress associated with the relative clause, a cross-linguistically rare possibility in languages. The findings throw a new light on theories concerned with the syntactic licensing of sluicing and ellipsis in general, pointing at the crucial role of prosody.