On gapless relatives in spoken English

Abstract

This paper investigates gapless relatives in spoken English. Typically, relative clauses in English contain gaps inside them, being derived via Move of wh-relative pronouns to their peripheries. Collins and Radford (2015) in fact follow this traditional approach to gapless relatives in spoken English, postulating prepositions that underlyingly take as their complements wh-relative pronouns but undergo ghosting as PF ellipsis in this construction. In their account, gapless relatives in spoken English are now reanalyzed as gapped ones. Pointing out that their postulation and later deletion of prepositions for gapless relatives confronts the well-known deletion recoverability problem, we instead propose that gapless relatives in the language at issue are derived by base-generation of relative pronouns in the specifier of TopP in relative clauses, and that to obtain the proper meaning relationship between relative pronouns as topics and the following relative clause TPs, prepositions are recruited via pragmatic inferencing. In this regard, we show that gapless relatives in spoken English are derived in much the analogous fashion as their counterparts in East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.