Sluicing Revisited

Sandra Chung, William Ladusaw, and James McCloskey, University of California, Santa Cruz

Two sub-cases of sluicing can be distinguishedÑ'merger' and 'sprouting'. Recent discussions have focused on merger; here we concentrate on sprouting. We review observations which raise difficulties for purely semantic treatments of recoverability, and which suggest that reference must be made to to form rather than meaning in the licensing of sluicing. We consider various solutions to these puzzles, including Fox's (1999) accommodation-based approach and Chung's (2005) proposal that the elided constituent must be constructed from the lexical resources of the antecedent. The guiding intuition is that ellipsis is 're-use' of a phrase, in a sense which we try to elucidate.

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