Malagasy sluicing and its consequences for the identity requirement on ellipsis

Abstract

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.