Abstract
It is well-known that certain syntactic properties constrain ellipsis (e.g., voice marking, argument structure) while others do not (e.g., movement out of islands). Based on a cross-linguistic survey of sluicing constructions (featuring data from Aklanon, Chamorro, Kaqchikel, Malagasy, Nukuoro, and Nupe), I observe that argument extraction restrictions, like islands, fall in the latter category: there is no known restriction on argument A'-extraction that persists under sluicing, which I term the sluicing-extraction generalization (SEG). I argue that the SEG is not appropriately captured by recent weakened syntactic identity analyses (e.g., Ranero 2021), which fail to account for the breadth of the generalization. Rather, I show that semantic accounts like LF-copying (Chung, Ladusaw & McCloskey 1995) do well in capturing the complete lack of movement restrictions under sluicing. Additionally, I argue that this account can also capture the voice mismatch data, which has previously been used as evidence for strict syntactic identity.
Published in
Proceedings of the 40th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Jiayi Lu, Erika Petersen, Anissa Zaitsu, and Boris Harizanov
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-482-9 hardback
v + 346 pages
publication date: 2024
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA