A Constituent Deletion Approach to the Fragment Answers in Pseudoclefts

This paper aims at revealing the nature of counterweight in the pseudoclefts by reanalyzing the connectivity and anti-connectivity effects from a new perspective. I basically follow den Dikken et al’s (2000) QAP account that pseudoclefts are Question and Answer pairs and that there is deletion in the counterweight position. But I depart from their account by assuming that the relevant deletion is a constituent deletion which applies after the focus movement of the focused phrase to the counterweight initial position. It will be shown that this idea can successfully accommodate the anti-connectivity effects as well as connectivity effects and can extend to the explanation of the new sets of data in pseudoclefts.