Cleft Sources for the Sluice and Identity in Ellipsis

Abstract

Park, Myung-Kwan. 2015. Cleft Sources for the Sluice and Identity in Ellipsis. Korean Journal of Linguistics, 40-1, 87-106. This paper investigates the controversial issue of developing a cleft structure analysis for the sluice that derives from Sluicing or TP ellipsis. We show that there are some constructions that require positing different types of cleft clause as the underlying structure of the sluice. Specifically, Sluicing/TP ellipsis in the p ∨ q construction of English is shown to apply to the inferential cleft clause. In Spanish or Polish, P-stranding is fed by Sluicing, which now applies to the truncated cleft clause. In English, Sluicing also applies after a preposition pied-piping wh-phrase moves out of a reduced cleft clause. Although all these three cases involve cleft clause for the sluice and non-cleft, declarative clause for its antecedent, we show that the clause type mismatch between cleft sluice and non-cleft antecedent clauses does not impinge on the identity condition on ellipsis, because the two elements, found additionally only in the cleft sluice clauses, such as the subject pronoun it and the inflected form of be, can be analyzed as a clausal anaphor referring to the antecedent of the sluiced clause, or a semantically-vacuous element. (Dongguk University)