English Sprouting : A Construction-Based Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the English sprouting within a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). The sprouting phenomenon is closely related to a sluicing phenomenon in that both phenomena have the isolated wh-fragment. However there is a distinct difference between the two – the sprouting phenomenon has no linguistic source of the isolated wh-fragment although the isolated wh-fragment is connected to its antecedent clause syntactically and semantically. In addition, there are some restrictions of the sprouting; it does not license the prepositional stranding, sprouting of subjects and indirect objects. In order to explain the idiosyncratic characteristics of the sprouting, I propose a new construction on the argument sprouting (sprouting-arg-sem-strctres-frag-cl) and on the adjunct sprouting (sprouting-adjunct-sem-strct-res-frag-cl) as well as a new construction on their supertype, sluicing (sluicing-sem-strctres-frag-cl).