Toward a Unified Analysis of the Finiteness Restriction in Multiple Fragment Answer, Gapping, and Multiple Sluicing

Abstract

his paper investigates the syntax of Multiple Fragment Answer (MFA), Gapping, and Multiple Sluicing (MS) in English, the common thread of these three constructions being the survival of more than one expression outside a deletion site. One outstanding issue raised by these constructions is the finiteness restriction that disallows the second surviving expression from escaping the finite embedded clause to the edge of the matrix TP to be deleted. We argue that this restriction follows from parallelism that governs the syntax and semantics of the ellipsis clause and its corresponding antecedent clause. Specifically, the inability of the second surviving expression to move out of the finite embedded clause to the outside of TP deletion is ascribed to the fact that its correlate expression in the antecedent clause is construed as a functional variable and quantificational, thus undergoing QR if it moves, so that it is clause-bounded. The finiteness restriction in these three constructions is shown to receive a unified analysis, thus theoretically more appealing than any other previous analyses.