Sluicing, Sprouting and Missing Objects
Ping Li, Ting‐Chi Wei · Studies in Chinese Linguistics · 2017
Abstract Taking “sluicing” to be derived by movement + deletion, as represented by Merchant (2001), and “pseudo-sluicing” to be a base-generated structure [ pro (+ be ) + wh ] (going by Wei 2004; Adams 2004), this paper reviews arguments for and against the presence of a sluicing construction in Mandarin Chinese. We show that all the tests available in the literature do not argue against the presence of such a sluicing construction, except the test building on the distribution of the copula shi . Unfortunately, the shi test is demonstrated to be uncertain and it cannot be used to argue conclusively that only a base-generation pseudo-sluicing analysis should be adopted. We show that a much clear evidence for an exclusive pseudo-sluicing analysis comes from the behavior of the sprouting construction. Investigation of sprouting also sheds light on the properties of null arguments, topic-variable relation, locality, and subcategorization of verbs in the language.