Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2005

Publication Title

Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) XXIV

Abstract

It has been observed by Ross (1969), Lasnik (1999, 2000) and Merchant (2001) that Sluicing, an instance of ellipsis, has an ability to ameliorate certain grammatical violations, such as extraction out of an island. It has also been argued by Merchant (2001) that Sluicing can repair Left-branch Extraction (LBE) violations. However, as Merchant (2001) observes, if a left-branch is extracted out of an island, Sluicing fails to repair the derivation. In section 2, I will demonstrate these puzzling facts and extend the initial observation to other contexts, combining several locality violations under Sluicing. In section 3, I examine what prevents LBE in certain languages, considering a phase-based account and a structural account of Bošković (2005). In section 4, I will argue that the structural account is superior to the phase-based account in that it draws a distinction between LBE violations and standard island violations. I propose that this distinction is crucial in our understanding of why LBE out of islands cannot be remedied by Sluicing. I will make proposals about how locality violations are encoded in the derivation. This will explain why certain violations disappear under Sluicing and others do not.

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Postprint

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