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In:Approaches to Hungarian: Volume 14: Papers from the 2013 Piliscsaba Conference
Edited by Katalin É. Kiss, Balázs Surányi and Éva Dékány
[Approaches to Hungarian 14] 2015
► pp. 187–207

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Relative pronouns as sluicing remnants

Published online: 3 June 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/atoh.14.08lip
This paper demonstrates on the basis of novel data from Hungarian that contrary to received opinion, sluicing is possible inside relative clauses. It shows that sluicing can affect a relative clause to the exclusion of its relative pronoun in headless or headed relatives that can be considered non-canonical free choice expressions. In sluicing, the relative pronoun that gets stranded in the ellipsis process furthermore bears the major stress associated with the relative clause, a cross-linguistically rare possibility in languages. The findings throw a new light on theories concerned with the syntactic licensing of sluicing and ellipsis in general, pointing at the crucial role of prosody.
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