Relative pronouns as sluicing remnants Anikó Lipták *pre-publication version, final version under copyright* Abstract This paper demonstrates on the basis of novel data from Hungarian that contrary to received opinion, sluicing is possible inside relative clauses. It shows that sluicing can affect a relative clause to the exclusion of its relative pronoun in headless or headed relatives that can be considered non-canonical free choice expressions. In sluicing, the relative pronoun that gets stranded in the ellipsis process furthermore bears the major stress associated with the relative clause, a cross-linguistically rare possibility in languages. The findings throw a new light on theories concerned with the syntactic licensing of sluicing and ellipsis in general, pointing at the crucial role of prosody. Keywords: sluicing, ellipsis, relative clauses, TP-deletion, antecedent-contained deletion 1. Introduction: restrictions on sluicing Sluicing, first identified and named in Ross (1969), is an instance of clausal ellipsis that leaves a single wh-remnant and deletes a TP in contexts in which the content of the TP is given in the preceding discourse. According to the generally adopted view in the syntactic literature sluicing is restricted to wh-interrogative clauses (cf. 1), and is not allowed in wh-relative clauses (cf. 2) (ellipsis is indicated by strikethrough, data from Lobeck 1995: p. 57, ex. 57a; Merchant 2001: p. 59, ex. 67 respectively, see also van Riemsijk 1987): (1) Someone stole the car, but they don't know who stole the car. (2) a. * Someone wants to talk to Mary, but the person who wants to talk to Mary is too shy to approach her. b. * Someone stole the car, but they couldn't find the person who stole the car. The above difference between interrogative and relative environments when it comes to the syntactic licensing of sluicing has puzzled syntacticians for a while now, but has received no explanation in the literature so far  researchers merely state that interrogativity is a quintessential licensing requirement on sluicing for reasons unknown. In Lobeck's government- based framework of ellipsis licensing, interrogative complementizers are said to possess a [+wh]- feature that makes them a 'strong' ellipsis licensor, contrary to relative complementizers with a [−wh] feature, which is incapable of licensing. In Merchant's implementation, where ellipsis is licensed by a syntactic feature E on the C°-head of constituent questions, the sluicing-type E feature possesses uninterpretable [uwh*,uQ*]-features that require overt checking against an interrogative complementizer but do not allow checking against any other complementizer type,