Abstract
Ellipsis is restricted by an identity condition such that elided material must be identical in some fashion to a linguistic antecedent. The traditional view is that this requirement is syntactic in nature. Merchant, in 2001, however, proposed that the identity condition is fundamentally semantic, leading to a substantive debate in the ellipsis literature. Potsdam, in 2007, used the sluicing construction in Malagasy to argue for Merchant's semantic licensing condition; however, since that work, at least two alternative analyses of sluicing constructions in other Austronesian languages, Nukuoro and Malay/Indonesian, have been proposed that are potentially compatible with a syntactic identity condition. This paper considers those analyses for Malagasy and shows that they are untenable. Malagasy sluicing requires that the antecedent and the elided clause need not be syntactically identical. It thus continues to support a non-syntactic identity condition on ellipsis.
Published Version
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