Sluicing and Focus Movement in Wh-in-situ Languages
Chyan‐an Arthur Wang, Hsiao‐hung Iris Wu · Scholarly Commons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2006
For wh-moving languages like English, the elliptical part is an IP, and the wh-phrase is immune from ellipsis since it wh-moves given a PF deletion account (cf. Lasnik 1999, Merchant 2001, to name just a few). However, a proper analysis of sluicing( -like) structures is still under debate for wh-irrsitu languages like Mandarin Chinese (MC) because the wh-phrases in these languages generally do not undergo overt wh-movement; thus the configuration that feeds IP deletion is apparently underivable. Based on MC data, the goal of this paper is to argue that overt movement of wh-phrases always takes place prior to IP ellipsis in sluicing, either to satisfy a [ +wh] feature in wh-moving languages like English or to meet a [+focus] feature requirement in wh-in-situ languages like MC. The paper starts with a description of MC sluicing data and, subsequently, our analysis is provided and compared with other approaches now on the market. Section 3 gives detailed arguments for favoring overt movement and a deletion operation as in our proposal. Section 4 discusses the occurrence of shi 'be' in MC with respect to argumentadjunct asymmetry; Section 5 concludes the paper.