---
title: "On reconstruction effects in English <i>wh</i>-slifting: Theoretical"
description: "The paper looks at English wh -slifting, as in \"Who did Mary see, do you think?\". 29 references."
authors: ["Christos Vlachos", "Nikoletta Christou", "Kleanthes K. Grohmann"]
year: 2019
venue: "Glossa: a journal of general linguistics"
source: "https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/5245/"
doi: "10.5334/gjgl.717"
licence: "CC BY 4.0"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/vlachos-2019-reconstruction-effects-english-i-wh/"
---
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# On reconstruction effects in English \<i>wh\</i>-slifting: Theoretical and experimental considerations

**Authors:** Christos Vlachos, Nikoletta Christou and Kleanthes K. Grohmann · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** [Glossa: a journal of general linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/) ([Glossa a journal of general linguistics 2019](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/glossa-a-journal-of-general-linguistics/2019/)) · **Publisher:** [Ubiquity Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/ubiquity-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.717) · [PDF](https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/5245/galley/12712/download) · [DOI 10.5334/gjgl.717](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.717) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2997165180)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper looks at English *wh*-slifting, as in "Who did Mary see, do you think?". Here a *wh*-question comes before a yes/no host question. The host verb normally takes declarative complements, yet the sentence is understood as if the *wh*-clause were that verb's complement. Earlier work (Haddican et al. 2014; Stepanov & Stateva 2016) used binding facts to argue that the two clauses are only paratactically linked, meaning the slift never sits below the host verb.

The authors re-examine Binding Principle C in two ways. They compare the "initial" order with the "split" order, and they vary the category of the *wh*-phrase. Some coreference patterns turn out to be impossible, and this only makes sense if the slift is interpreted below the host predicate. For Principle A, they ran a small acceptability-judgement pilot. Its results suggest that reflexives either support reconstruction or behave as exempt anaphors, so either way they give no evidence against it.

The overall verdict favours a hypotactic analysis. This leaves an open puzzle: how a proposition-selecting verb can take a question.

## Key points
- Two equivalent word orders are distinguished:
  - initial: "What did John buy, do you think?"
  - split: "What, do you think, did John buy?"
- With the split order, coreference between *he* and *John* is ruled out. This is a Principle C violation, which shows that the slift reconstructs. It also shows that the host is not a parenthetical adjunct placed inside the slift.
- In the initial order, an adjectival *wh*-phrase also blocks coreference ("How afraid of John are you, does he think?"). So the earlier claim that Principle C "bleeds" in slifting does not hold in general.
- The authors set aside the backward variable-binding argument. Host subjects are strongly restricted to the second person, and quantifiers, indefinites, numerals and NPIs are infelicitous there for independent reasons.
- In the Principle A pilot, the "intermediate" condition lowered acceptability both for slifting ("whole") and for ordinary *wh*-movement ("part"). In the ordinary-movement case, mean ratings fell from 6.29 (part–base) to 5.96 (part–intermediate), close to the GA value of 5.62. The control items came from Frank Keller.

## Interesting ideas
- Test structure by checking whether two surface orders with the same meaning get the same verdict under a single constraint; a mismatch shows which attachment analysis is wrong.
- Before using a failed binding or quantifier reading as structural evidence, rule out an independent pragmatic restriction that might cause it, as the authors do with the host's second-person subjects.
- Compare the target construction against a baseline construction (ordinary *wh*-movement) built with the same factorial manipulation, so that any effect common to both can be factored out.
- Treat some reflexives as exempt (logophoric) anaphors rather than as strictly bound ones, so that they do not count as evidence about syntactic position.
- Read slifted questions like "X, do you think?" as the embedded question of the host verb, since the meaning is a question about the hearer's belief.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tree): Paraphrase-order pairs can be fed to the parsers to check whether the attachment of a fronted or interrupting clause stays consistent across orders.
- **I2** (learn): Evaluation could add negative controls that separate pragmatic infelicity from structural ungrammaticality before a parse is blamed.
- **I3** (learn): Self-repair rules could be validated by checking whether an error pattern also appears in a matched baseline construction, which would make it a general effect rather than a construction-specific one.
- **I4** (frames): Coreference for *himself* inside fronted or picture-NP phrases could allow a perspective-holder antecedent instead of demanding a c-commanding one.
- **I5** (answer): QA and speech-act handling could map these questions to "what does the addressee think about X", rather than treating them as two unrelated questions.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Patras](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-patras/) — University, Pátrai, Greece · 2 works · 432 citations
- [University of Cyprus](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-cyprus/) — University, Nicosia, Cyprus · 2 works

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## Cite

Cite as: Christos Vlachos, Nikoletta Christou and Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2019. On reconstruction effects in English \<i>wh\</i>-slifting: Theoretical and experimental considerations. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{vlachos2019reconstruction,
  title = {{On reconstruction effects in English <i>wh</i>-slifting: Theoretical and experimental considerations}},
  author = {Christos Vlachos, Nikoletta Christou and Kleanthes K. Grohmann},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.717},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.717}
}
```

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26. How to cite this article: Vlachos, Christos, Nikoletta Christou and Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2019. On reconstruction effects in English wh-slifting: Theoretical and experimental considerations. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 138. 1–17. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.717 [↗](https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.717)
27. Accepted: 15 September 2019 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Accepted%3A+15+September+2019)
28. Published: 23 December 2019 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Published%3A+23+December+2019)
29. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS [↗](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

*Updated 1 November 2026*