ANTECEDENT-CONTAINED SLUICING AND IDENTITY IN ELLIPSIS

Abstract

In order to explore the nature of identity in ellipsis, this paper examines so-called antecedent-contained sluicing, where the antecedent of the sluiced clause appears to contain the ellipsis site. Based on new observations from English, German and Russian, which show that syntactic identity is required to capture the properties of the construction in question, I propose an analysis that tries to maintain the approach based on purely syntactic identity. Specifically, it is proposed that the derivation of antecedent-contained sluicing involves counter-cyclic adjunction of a constituent containing the ellipsis site to avoid an infinite regress problem.