18 Another Look at Preposition Stranding: English and Swedish Discourse Patterns

On Preposition Stranding

The phenomena of preposition stranding is very rare when examining various languages around the world. The most distinct class of languages that demonstrates this is that of the Germanic languages. Behavior within the Germanic languages varies from one language to the next. On the one end, Danish, as Herslund (1984:58) puts it, “...allows almost completely free stranding of prepositions.” Horns...

Preposition stranding and pied-piping in second language acquisition

The present paper endeavours to investigate whether L1 Persian speakers are sensitive to a ‘poverty of the stimulus’ situation in English: the asymmetrical constraint on piedpiping and stranding constructions. Both prepositions and particles can be stranded in interrogatives and relative clauses, but only prepositional phrases can appear in piedpiping structures. In contrast, Persian licenses p...

Variable vs. Categorical Effects Preposition Pied Piping and Stranding in British English Relative Clauses

Swiping in Child English

English allows a peculiar type of elliptical wh-questions that can be found only under sluicing, in which the wh-object of the preposition appears not after the preposition but before it, as in “John fixed it, but I don’t remember what with.” Merchant (2002) calls this construction Swiping. This study evaluates two competing syntactic analyses of Swiping, by using data from a novel source: the ...

Comparing French PP-attachment to English, German and Swedish

The correct attachment of prepositional phrases (PPs) is a central disambiguation problem when parsing natural languages. This paper compares the baseline situation for French as exemplified in the Le Monde treebank with earlier findings for English, German and Swedish. We perform uniform treebank queries and show that the noun attachment rate for French prepositions is strongly influenced by t...