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Malagasy sluicing and its consequences for the identity requirement on ellipsis

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Abstract

Linguistic material cannot be freely deleted in a sentence; rather, elided material must be recoverable via some kind of parallelism with an antecedent. This paper uses sluicing (IP ellipsis) in Malagasy to argue that this parallelism requirement is a semantic restriction and not a syntactic one. An elided constituent must be semantically parallel to its antecedent but need not have parallel syntactic structure (Merchant, 2001). In Malagasy, wh-questions are pseudoclefts. Given that antecedent clauses are not pseudoclefts, sluicing is ruled out if syntactic parallelism is necessary. Sluicing is correctly allowed if there is only a semantic parallelism requirement. The paper considers an alternative that would avoid this conclusion: Malagasy wh-questions are clefts and the construction under investigation is pseudosluicing (Merchant, 1998), which is not subject to a linguistic parallelism requirement. This alternative is shown to be untenable.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Florida, P.O. Box 115454, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Eric Potsdam

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I would like to thank Tina Boltz, Noro Brady, Annie Rasoanaivo, Hasina Randriamihamina, Bodo Randrianasolo, Voara Randrianasolo, and Charlotte Abel-Ratovo for the language consultations. All data are from my own notes unless otherwise indicated. I am grateful to audiences at NELS 33, AFLA 10, and CLS 40, where much of this material was presented. I thank them, Marcel den Dikken, Hana Filip, Ed Keenan, Paul Law, Jason Merchant, Ileana Paul, Matt Pearson, Maria Polinsky, Joachim Sabel, and three anonymous NLLT reviewers for valuable discussions and criticism. This work is supported by NSF grant BCS-0131993.

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Potsdam, E. Malagasy sluicing and its consequences for the identity requirement on ellipsis. Nat Language Linguistic Theory 25, 577–613 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-006-9015-4

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