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Gaps, ghosts and gapless relatives in spoken English
Author(s) -
Collins Chris,
Radford Andrew
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/stul.12033
Subject(s) - gapless playback , linguistics , relative clause , ghosting , syntax , dependent clause , predicate (mathematical logic) , object (grammar) , interpretation (philosophy) , philosophy , physics , computer science , artificial intelligence , sentence , programming language , condensed matter physics
This paper looks at the syntax of so‐called gapless relative clauses in spoken English. §1 contrasts gap relatives (like that italicised in ‘something which I said ’, in which there is a gap internally within the relative clause associated with the relativised constituent) with gapless relatives (like that italicised in ‘They were clowning around, which I didn't really care until I found out they had lost my file ’, in which there is no apparent gap within the relative clause). In §2, we note that a number of recent analyses take which to function as a subordinating conjunction in gapless relatives, but we argue against this view and provide evidence that the wh‐word in such clauses is indeed a relative pronoun. In §3, we argue that the relative pronoun in gapless relatives serves as the object of a ‘silent’ preposition. In §4, we present an analysis under which a preposition can be silent when it undergoes a type of deletion operation called Ghosting . §5 discusses gapless relatives which have a Topic‐Comment interpretation, and argues for an extended Ghosting analysis under which a TP containing a predicate of saying associated with the ghosted preposition is also ghosted. Our overall conclusion is that supposedly ‘gapless’ relatives are more properly analysed as containing a gap created by relativization of the object of a ghosted preposition.