Reverse sluicing in English and Greek
Anastasia Giannakidou, Jason Merchant · The Linguistic Review · 1998
In this article we identify and analyze a novel elliptical phenomenon in English and Greek which we dub reverse sluicing. We show that a complete account of reverse sluicing follows from an extension of the analysis of sluicing proposed in Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloskey (1995). Chung et al.'s operation of IP-copy, which reconstructs a missing IP at LF, supplemented by the standard Heimian analysis of indefinites, can successfully capture the facts in Greek. We discuss the differences between English and Greek and argue that these differences can be reduced to an independent difference in the availability of certain empty categories in the two languages. We claim further that the copy theory of movement (Chomsky 1995) provides a natural account for the restrictions on the interpretation of the indefinite variables involved.