Comments on Pullum's Criticisms

We are reasonably convinced by the remarks in Pullum (p. 182) that the sluicing construction, on which the argument in Postal and Langendoen (p. 177) for the non-CFhood of English is based, is not, contrary to what is assumed there, subject to an intrasentential matching condition. Consequently, the argument does not go through. However, we believe that an analogous argument can be given, which is not subject to Pullum's line of criticism. Consider the somewhat stilted but unquestionably grammatical doubling relative construction illustrated by (1).