Pragmatic Inference in the Interpretation of Sluiced Prepositional Phrases*
Henry Beecher, University of California, San Diego
An examination of sluiced prepositional phrases reveals sluices which cannot be interpreted via parallelism with an antecedent. To accommodate these, I propose that sluices are licensed by serving to question an inferred argument of a semantically compatible and salient antecedent. Both a corpus investigation and a grammaticality survey provide corroboration.
* I am indebted to UCSD’s semantics and compling groups for their valuable input. Any errors remain my own.
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