PHONOLOGICAL ADJACENCY AS A TRIGGER OF MOVEMENT

Abstract

This paper investigates wh-movement (more precisely category movement) under Sluicing. Sluicing is the ellipsis by which wh-questions are reduced to wh-phrases. One widely held view has been that remnant wh-phrases move to a clause-initial position (cf. Ross (1969), Merchant (2001)). Furthermore, it has been claimed that the presence of a wh-phrase in this position is required to license Sluicing (cf. Lobeck (1995)). Challenging this standard view, this paper claims based on Agbayani’s (2000, 2006), and Agbayani and Ochi’s (2006) movement theory that wh-phrases usually stay in their underlying positions (though they do move in some cases because of a phonological requirement) and that the presence of a wh-phrase in a clause-initial position is not required as a licensing condition. At the same time, this paper presents novel data which empirically support Agbayani’s (2000, 2006), and Agbayani and Ochi’s (2006) proposal that category movement is driven by a certain adjacency requirement.