Sluicing Remnants also Meet Identity in Ellipsis

Abstract

It is generally acknowledged that Sluicing is derived from eliding an ordinary TP. Barros (2012), however, makes an argument in favor of a truncated cleft source of the sluiced clause, drawing attention to examples where the sluiced wh-XP remnant apparently cannot be referentially associated with its antecedent ‘some XP else.’ Vicente et al. (2021) recently adduce Spanish truncated clefts to show that Barros’s (2012) cleft analysis for such an example is not valid, but they adhere to Barros’s (2013) notion of a contextually-sensitive variable to capture the domain restriction property that a sluiced wh-remnant bears. In this squib paper, we show that the domain restriction property at issue is dictated by the general condition of identity in ellipsis, thereby reinstating the traditional wisdom that Sluicing is an elision of a non-cleft ordinary TP.