Pre/postposition Stranding under Sluicing and the Identity Condition on Ellipsis

Abstract

This paper examines the exceptional behavior of P-stranding under Sluicing in some languages which do not allow P-stranding under regular wh- movement (cf. Merchant (2001)). Spanish, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese and Indonesian, in contrast to Greek and Czech, are in principle a preposition- pied-piping language, but they allow P-stranding under Sluicing that arguably derives from cleft structure or via repair-by-ellipsis. Still critical to this process of P-stranding under Sluicing is the identity-in-ellipsis requirement that the morpho-syntactic form of the surviving wh-expression in the sluiced clause matches the one that its overt or covert correlate expression would potentially take if it underwent regular wh-movement. Extending this generalization to ‘Sluicing’ and ‘Fragmenting’ in Korean, we show that the somewhat unexpected postposition stranding and omission of the wh- and fragment expression in these constructions of Korean also derive from (pseudo-)cleft structure, meeting the identity/parallelism condition on ellipsis.