This Commentaire bears out a prediction of Anand et al.'s (to appear) syntactic identity condition on sluicing. Identity is calculated over argument domains as small as small clauses. With extraction of a small clause subject, sluicing is possible where only a small clause predicate has an antecedent.

The so-called aggressively non-D-linked construction (ANDC) involving wh-the-hell phrases like what the hell is of empirical and theoretical interest due to its complex morphosyntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties. This paper focuses on the construction in general as well as in ellipsis phenomena. We first explore its grammatical properties on the basis of attested corpus data and show that the construction can occur more widely in elliptical constructions than suggested by previous literature. We then suggest that the licensing conditions of the ANDC in ellipsis are not solely syntax-based but due to tight interactions among a variety of grammatical components such as morphosyntax, semantics, and discourse/pragmatics. We also argue that the authentic uses of the construction favor a Direct Interpretation (DI) approach that can account for its uses in a variety of environments.

This paper investigates the reason why aggressively non-D-linked items such as wh-the-hell (WTH) are allowed in swiping, but not in sluicing. Investigating the potential syntactic, semantic and prosodic licensors of WTH in sluicing and swiping in the British English variety, we conclude that syntactic or semantic constraints cannot be the source of the difference. Instead, we propose a novel prosodic account in which the WTH must satisfy the prosodic licensing condition that it cannot bear nuclear accent. We show that this is satisfied in swiping, but not in sluicing contexts. On the basis of the novel findings of an acceptability rating study of swiping, which reveal that both ‘given’ and ‘new’ prepositions are equally acceptable for British English speakers, we argue that the preposition is accentuated in this elliptical construction because it is structurally the deepest element. The licensing condition on WTHs in sluicing and swiping is therefore not mediated directly by the conditions on ellipsis, but by the particular prosodic distribution that a WTH happens to have in sluicing and swiping. We extend the account to similar constructions in Dutch.

This paper documents the existence of swiping – that is, inversion of a wh-phrase and its associated preposition under sluicing – in a non-Germanic language. We discuss swiping in a variety of Ontario French (Lafontaine French, LFF), which shares some of the characteristics of its extensively-studied English counterpart (Ross 1969, Merchant 2002, among others). We offer a preliminary description of swiping in LFF and consider some implications of these novel facts for the theory of swiping and sluicing. We suggest that LFF swiping supports an analysis in terms of non-constituent deletion, as originally suggested by Ross (1969) in his seminal work on sluicing.

In this article, we take a detailed look at clausal ellipsis in Icelandic, a hitherto understudied phenomenon. We focus on case-matching and case-mismatching facts in fragment responses. We argue that although case matching is the norm, constrained instances of case mismatching strongly suggest that there must be silent structure in the ellipsis site, and some syntactic identity condition. We outline these patterns in detail, and provide an analysis that assumes a post-syntactic approach to case marking, and a hybrid identity condition along the lines of Chung (2013).