Gaps, ghosts and gapless relatives in spoken English

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.