This Commentaire bears out a prediction of Anand et al.'s (to appear) syntactic identity condition on sluicing. Identity is calculated over argument domains as small as small clauses. With extraction of a small clause subject, sluicing is possible where only a small clause predicate has an antecedent.

This paper documents the existence of swiping – that is, inversion of a wh-phrase and its associated preposition under sluicing – in a non-Germanic language. We discuss swiping in a variety of Ontario French (Lafontaine French, LFF), which shares some of the characteristics of its extensively-studied English counterpart (Ross 1969, Merchant 2002, among others). We offer a preliminary description of swiping in LFF and consider some implications of these novel facts for the theory of swiping and sluicing. We suggest that LFF swiping supports an analysis in terms of non-constituent deletion, as originally suggested by Ross (1969) in his seminal work on sluicing.

The International Year of Astronomy marks the 400th anniversary of Kepler's Astronomia nova and the first use of the telescope for astronomy, most notably leading to Galileo's Sidereus nuncius (1610). Kepler's book for the first time argued strongly for a physical basis to astronomical explanations. Galileo's work showed that a coherent understanding was more important for scientific progress than specific proofs. The efforts of both astronomers undermined the traditional geocentric cosmology and essentially brought about the birth of modern astronomy.