Original Paper
Malagasy sluicing and its consequences for the identity requirement on ellipsis
Eric Potsdam1 
| (1) |
Department of Linguistics, University of Florida, P.O. Box 115454, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA |
Received: 22 January 2005 Revised: 10 August 2006 Accepted: 10 August 2006 Published online: 24 May 2007
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.
Keywords Malagasy - Sluicing - Ellipsis licensing - Predicate fronting -
Wh-questions - Pseudocleft
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.
References secured to subscribers.