Multiple Sluicing, Scope, and Superiority: Consequences for Ellipsis Identity
Hadas Kotek, Matthew Barros
August 2017
 

This paper defends a semantic identity account of ellipsis licensing. The argument will come from examples of multiple sluicing as discussed e.g. in Romero 1998; Lasnik 2014, focusing on data in Russian. We concentrate in particular on antecedents that contain two quantified statements and uncover a surprising asymmetry, where surface-scope antecedents can license a multiple sluice, but inverse-scope antecedents cannot. We argue that this finding is explained by semantic accounts of ellipsis licensing, where ellipsis is licensed when the sluice corresponds to an (implicit) Question under Discussion (cf. AnderBois, 2014; Barros, 2014; Weir, 2014). We show that QuDs cannot be computed based on the truth-conditional content of the antecedents alone; instead, they must be computed only after (scalar) implicatures have been calculated and added to the common ground, along with the context of utterance. We further discuss the commitments required of a syntactic LF-identity account of ellipsis licensing in order to account for multiple sluicing with quantified antecedents, and argue that accounts along these lines would run into serious trouble, making them practically untenable.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/003549
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Linguistic Inquiry
keywords: sluicing, ellipsis licensing, pair-list readings, scope, parallelism, semantics, syntax
previous versions: v1 [July 2017]
Downloaded:1218 times

 

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