Maintaining syntactic identity under sluicing: Pseudoclefts and voice (mis)matches
Emily Drummond
June 2021 

While many scholars agree that the identity condition on sluicing is at least partially syntactic (e.g., Merchant 2013), two potential challenges to syntactic identity have recently been documented in non-European languages. Potsdam (2007) shows that Malagasy pseudoclefts can undergo sluicing with a non-pseudocleft antecedent, and some voice mismatches due to extraction restrictions are grammatical under sluicing (Ranero 2021). This paper presents novel sluicing data from Nukuoro (Polynesian Outlier) to demonstrate that these two challenges can be accounted for under a syntactic identity condition. First, pseudocleft sluicing is shown to involve ellipsis of a smaller constituent, namely the relative IP (e.g., Lipták 2015), which is syntactically identical to the matrix antecedent. Second, apparent voice mismatches can be analyzed as ergative extraction repair under ellipsis, as has been identified for islands (Ross 1969) and that-trace effects (Perlmutter 1971). The latter analysis provides insight into the nature of extraction restrictions, specifically that they should be analyzed like islands or that-trace effects (e.g., Coon et al. 2014; Erlewine 2020), PF violations, or agreement phenomena (e.g., Pearson 2005).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006285 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in the Proceedings of WCCFL 39
keywords:	sluicing, pseudoclefts, extraction restrictions, ergative extraction, polynesian, syntax
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