P-omission under sluicing, [P clitic] and the nature of P-stranding

This paper discusses preposition (P) omission under sluicing (John talked with someone but I don't know _ who) and the ability of P to take a clitic pronoun as a complement (We talked about'im), correlated with P-stranding (the ability of P to stay in situ when its complement undergoes movement, Who are you talking with_?) through generalizations that were proposed in Merchant (2001) and Abels (2003a,b) respectively. These studies establish P-stranding as a necessary condition for both phenomena, but I show that the correlations may stem instead from the ability of Ps to project independent Prosodic Words in the P-stranding languages.