The Syntax of Sluicing

Abstract

Abstract In this chapter I examine the structural conditions on sluicing and investigate its external and internal syntax. The first issue, the external syntax, is by far the easier to tackle, and the answer reached there is straightforward: the ‘sluice’ is a CP. The second, which requires investigating the structure of ellipsis—that is, the syntax of silence—can be approached only by more indirect means and is, therefore, much more difficult; the answer defended here is that the ellipsis site contains syntactic structures of the kind familiar from overt syntax. This chapter proceeds roughly in order of analytic difficulty. I begin with the simpler task, identifying the category of the sluice by looking at what the external distribution of sluiced wh-phrases is. The conclusion is unambiguous: sluices behave as CPs. This leads to the hypothesis that the sluice consists of a CP in which the sentential part, the IP, has gone missing. With this in mind, I turn to the more difficult question of what mechanisms in the grammar license this silent IP. We will see that the conditions are fairly parochial, being limited to certain feature combinations on the C sister to the null IP. To capture these, I propose a mechanism for triggering deletion at PF based on feature movement to C. I conclude by tackling a vexing analytic question raised by a novel generalization established in §2.2.2: nothing but the wh-phrase itself can appear overtly in the COMP domain under sluicing. I suggest that this fact is related to other, probably prosodic, limitations on the kinds of null elements that can immediately follow complementizers.