Merchant (2001) argues that sluicing is derived by IP-deletion from an underlying wh-construction at the level of PF (following Ross 1969), as shown in (1).
Merchant (2001:92) proposes (2) to capture the parallelism between sluicing and wh-questions.
The PSG is demonstrated in (1b), where the wh-sluice ‘who’ leaves a stranded preposition under sluicing, which corresponds to the fact that English is a P-stranding language. Merchant further demonstrates the descriptive power of the PSG by verifying its applicability to more than twenty languages. Examples drawn from other languages continue to confirm its validity (e.g., Almeida and Yoshida 2007, Stjepanović 2008, Rodrigues, Nevins, and Vicente 2009, Van Craenenbroeck 2010).
In this squib, I investigate Emirati Arabic (EA) in detail and argue that it provides cases in which the PSG can be falsified. In EA, while P-stranding is banned...