Malagasy Sluicing and Its Consequences for the Identity Requirement on Ellipsis

Linguistic material cannot be freely deleted in a sentence; rather, elided material must be recoverable via some kind of parallelism with an antecedent. This paper uses sluicing (IP ellipsis) in Malagasy to argue that this parallelism requirement is a semantic restriction and not a syntactic one. An...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Natural language and linguistic theory 2007-08, Vol.25 (3), p.577-613
Main Author: Potsdam, Eric
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Antecedents
Cleft constructions
Descriptive studies and applied theories
Ellipsis
Grammatical clauses
Grammatical constructions
Hoes
Language
Language culture relationship
Licenses
Linguistics
Malagasy language
Merchants
Morphology
Predicates
Questions
Relative clauses
Semantics
Syntactic structures
Syntactical antecedents
Syntactics
Syntax
Thematic studies
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Summary:Linguistic material cannot be freely deleted in a sentence; rather, elided material must be recoverable via some kind of parallelism with an antecedent. This paper uses sluicing (IP ellipsis) in Malagasy to argue that this parallelism requirement is a semantic restriction and not a syntactic one. An elided constituent must be semantically parallel to its antecedent but need not have parallel syntactic structure (Merchant, 2001). In Malagasy, wh-questions are pseudoclefts. Given that antecedent clauses are not pseudoclefts, sluicing is ruled out if syntactic parallelism is necessary. Sluicing is correctly allowed if there is only a semantic parallelism requirement. The paper considers an alternative that would avoid this conclusion: Malagasy wh-questions are clefts and the construction under investigation is pseudosluicing (Merchant, 1998), which is not subject to a linguistic parallelism requirement. This alternative is shown to be untenable.
ISSN:0167-806X
1573-0859
DOI:10.1007/s11049-006-9015-4