Invisible optionality: On the recoverablity and licensing requirements of sluicing

Monday, 13 October 2008, Colloquium

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, NYU.

Abstract

This talk starts out from the old question of whether a sluicing example such as (1) is derived from a full wh-question as in (2) (Ross 1969, Merchant 2001) or from a copular clause as in (3) (Pollman 1975, Erteshik-Shir 1977).

(1) John met someone, but I don’t know who.
(2) John met someone, but I don’t know who <John met>.
(3) John met someone, but I don’t know who <it was>.

I show that of the ten arguments that Merchant (2001:115-127) gives against the analysis in (3), only one strongly suggests that the structure in (3) never occurs (all the other arguments being compatible with a scenario in which both (2) and (3) are optionally available): in languages with morphological case marking, the sluiced wh-phrase never shows up in the case predicted by the copular source. At the same time, however, there is independent evidence suggesting that in certain cases copular clauses *can* be used as underlying structure for a sluice. In this talk I seek to provide a unified account of these at first sight contradictory data by (i) adapting Merchant’s e-GIVENness requirement so that it allows for the possibility of copular sluices, and (b) proposing a new, morphological licensing requirement on ellipsis to account for the case facts.