Gaps, Ghosts and Gapless Relatives in Spoken English

This paper looks at the syntax of so-called gapless relative clauses in spoken English. �1 contrasts gap relatives (like that italicised in ?something which I said?, in which there is a gap internally within the relative clause associated with the relativised constituent) with gapless relatives (like that italicised in ?They were clowning around, which I didn't really care until I found out they had lost my file?, in which there is no apparent gap within the relative clause). In �2, we note that a number of recent analyses take which to function as a subordinating conjunction in gapless relatives, but we argue against this view and provide evidence that the wh-word in such clauses is indeed a relative pronoun. In �3, we argue that the relative pronoun in gapless relatives serves as the object of a ?silent? preposition. In �4, we present an analysis under which a preposition can be silent when it undergoes a type of deletion operation called Ghosting. �5 discusses gapless relatives which have a Topic-Comment interpretation, and argues for an extended Ghosting analysis under which a TP containing a predicate of saying associated with the ghosted preposition is also ghosted. Our overall conclusion is that supposedly ?gapless? relatives are more properly analysed as containing a gap created by relativization of the object of a ghosted preposition.