Guess what? Clefts are what we are silencing here
In this paper, I present new evidence that in Brazilian Portuguese sluiced TPs with preposition deletion are cases of pseudosluicing, involving a clefting plus TP deletion strategy, as suggested by Rodrigues et al. (2009) First, preposition deletion is allowed only in contexts in which clefts are licensed. Second, preposition deletion (i.e. pseudosluicing) has semantic consequences not observed in regular sluicing.