Why-stripping in English: A corpus-based perspective

Abstract

Why-stripping in English, a type of elliptical constructions, consists of the expression why and a focus bearing remnant (e.g., Why me?). The construction shares certain properties with related constructions such as Sluicing and Stripping but at the same time has its own independent peculiarities. This paper first reviews some key properties of the construction and investigates its uses with attested corpus data. In accounting for how unexpressed expressions in such an elliptical construction can be resolved, there have been two competing trends, movement-and-deletion and direct interpretation (DI) approaches. The former postulates unpronounced syntactic representations at the ellipsis site while the latter consults the semantic/discourse information present in the antecedent. A variety of the corpus data we have identified as Why-stripping challenge the movement-and-deletion approach that heavily depends upon the syntactic information in the antecedent in order to resolve the elided parts. The paper briefly sketches how the attested data can be accounted for within a DI approach. (Kyung Hee University · Universite de Paris)