This article is concerned with the role of syntax in the licensing of sluicing in English. It amends and provides new support for a proposal made by Rudin (2019) in which syntax plays a crucial but circumscribed role: crucial in that antecedents are required; circumscribed in that matching with an antecedent holds only with respect to a proper subpart of the elided clause—its argumental core.

This article analyzes mismatches between syntactic and prosodic constituency in Irish and attempts to understand those mismatches in terms of recent proposals about the nature of the syntax-prosody interface. It argues in particular that such mismatches are best understood in terms of Selkirk’s (2011) Match Theory, working in concert with constraints concerned with rhythm and phonological balance. An apparently anomalous rightward movement that seems to target certain pronouns and shift them rightward is shown to be fundamentally a phonological process: a prosodic response to a prosodic dilemma. The article thereby adds to a growing body of evidence for the role of phonological factors in shaping constituent order.

The English of northwestern Ireland allows quantifier float of a previously undocumented kind in wh -questions. The quantifier all , though construed with a fronted wh -pronoun, may appear in a position considerably to the right of that pronoun. It is argued that all so stranded marks a position through which a wh -phrase has passed or in which a wh -phrase originates. The construction then provides visible evidence for intermediate derivational stages. This evidence is used to develop a new argument for successive cyclicity and to argue for overt object shift in English and for an origin site for subjects strictly within VP and below the object shift position.