Answer ellipsis

Of the types of ellipsis mechanisms, answer fragments behave most like sluicing, a point that shall be illustrated below.

The elided material in the examples in this article is indicated using a smaller font and subscripts: This sort of data could easily be expanded.

[1] The following tree illustrates such an analysis in a phrase structure grammar: The object nothing is moved to the left out of the constituent S in such a manner that S (the lower S) can then be elided.

Analyses of fragment answers that incorporate movement of the remnant of ellipsis in the manner just sketched have a way of accounting for two important facts documented in the literature.

First, in languages that require preposition pied-piping such as German, fragment answers that retain the preposition (pied-pipe it, on the movement analysis) are judged significantly more acceptable than those that do not retain it,[2] a phenomenon related to what is known as the Preposition-Stranding Generalization (or Merchant's Generalization).