Linguistics Colloquium: When You Can Sluice What: a talk by Matthew Barros, Yale University

Thursday, October 19, 2017 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM EDT
#447

I claim that two generalizations about sluicing in the recent literature are epiphenomenal, emerging from the interaction of independent properties of sluicing and answerhood. The primary focus is on the generalization in Dayal & Schwarzschild 2010, dubbed Antecedent-Correlate Harmony (ACH). The empirical pattern is shown to follow from how the semantics of Wh-phrases and correlates interact with Barker’s (in press) Answer Ban generalization, where the antecedent cannot be an answer to the sluiced question. In the latter part of the paper, I shift focus from ACH to the Answer Ban and show how the Answer Ban fills a previously unnoticed gap in Romero’s (1998) empirical coverage of Inheritance of Content effects in sluicing. The Answer Ban is, in turn, shown to follow straightforwardly from the recent semantic condition on sluicing proposed in AnderBois 2011.
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