An In-situ Approach to Sluicing in Locative Inversion

초록

This paper addresses an interesting phenomenon with respect to sluicing in locative inversion where a mismatch in grammaticality is observed; that is, sluicing improves grammaticality while its full-fledged counterpart is ungrammatical. To account for the mismatch, the previous research often appealed to either “repair-by-ellipsis” or “evasion” strategies, but I argue that neither of them are legitimate for locative inversion constructions, in that no island violation is involved in the relevant examples or the conditions for making use of evasion strategies turn out not to be satisfied. As an alternative, I propose an in-situ analysis of sluicing, based on Abe (2015), in which no wh-movement is triggered as long as C[Q] and wh-phrase are adjacent in PF; this can be done by sluicing since PF-deletion on the TP would lead the two to be close to each other. Under the alternative, the wh-subject is focused and remains in-situ, followed by deletion of the TP constituent except the wh-phrase. The ungrammaticality of the full-fledged structure is due to an independent factor. Following Rizzi’s (1997) split CP-hypothesis, I argue that the wh-subject with focus cannot raise to a higher position than the locative PP. Thus, the in-situ approach explains the mismatch between sluicing and full-fledged sentences in locative inversion.

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