Abstract
This paper presents novel English sluicing data that challenge even the most successful existing theories of the relationship between antecedent and elided content in sluicing constructions. The data supply robust evidence for a previously unobserved phenomenon in which the elided content and antecedent content in a sluicing construction contain opposite polarity. The data challenge current accounts of identity conditions on ellipsis by demonstrating that a greater mismatch between antecedent and elided content is possible than previously thought; specifically, the paper shows that the identity condition for sluicing must be sensitive to pragmatic — i.e. non-truth-conditional — content as well as to semantic content. This observation motivates a proposal in which sluicing is treated as a pragmatics-sensitive phenomenon licensed by local contextual entailment. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
1.1 Overview of the current projectSluicing, first noted by Ross (1969), is an ellipsis phenomenon in which the TP of an interrogative is elided under some identity condition, stranding an overt wh-phrase in the CP domain
I have shown two different polarity reversal examples that cannot be explained by non-isomorphic sluicing strategies
While this demonstrates that the polarity reversal data as a whole cannot be subsumed under a non-isomorphic sluicing analysis, I am not making the strong claim that no polarity reversal sluices can be non-isomorphic
Summary
First noted by Ross (1969), is an ellipsis phenomenon in which the TP of an interrogative is elided under some identity condition, stranding an overt wh-phrase in the CP domain. The presumed antecedent in (2), California will comply, has positive polarity while the interpretation of the ellipsis site, California won’t comply, has negative polarity.. The presumed antecedent in (3), John didn’t do an extra credit problem, has negative polarity, while the interpretation of the ellipsis site, he did do, has positive polarity. The polarity reversal data show a greater mismatch between antecedent and elided content than has been previously thought possible Because such mismatches were not believed possible, data like (2) and (3) challenge even the most successful existing theories of the licensing condition for sluicing. I show that the polarity reversal data are unable to be accounted for under theories that require any type of strict identity between the elided content and an antecedent in the discourse. This paper demonstrates that new and initially challenging data can be accounted for by combining traditional theories of ellipsis with insights from other areas in the literature
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