Theoretical-experimental remarks on the underlying structure of sluicing with preposition deletion

Abstract

Results of two acceptability judgment tasks on preposition deletion (P-deletion) in Brazilian Portuguese are presented. The first experiment contrasts P-deletion under sluicing (Merchant (2001) with P-deletion under interrogatives double-filled CPs. In the second experiment, acceptability of P-deletion in relative clauses and in sluicing is considered. The goals are: (i) to verify whether P-deletion is restricted to contexts of sluicing or a general phenomenon of interrogative double filled CPs, (ii) to analyze the structure underlying sluiced CPs. The results suggest that P-deletion happens in sluiced CPs and in relative clauses, being, thus, compatible with clefting analyses for P-deleted sluicing (Rodrigues et al., 2009), raising, therefore, questions about the status of the syntactic identity constraint.

Keywords

• apagamento de preposição, sluicing, interrogativas, relativas, clivadas.