Sluicing, Sprouting and Missing Objects
Taking “sluicing” to be derived by movement + deletion, as represented by , and “pseudo-sluicing” to be a base-generated structure [ (+ ) + ] (going by ; Adams 2004), this paper reviews arguments for and against the presence of a sluicing construction in Mandarin Chinese. We show that all the tests...
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Published in | Zhongguo yu wen yan jiu Vol. 38; no. 2; pp. 63 - 92 |
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Main Authors | , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Hong Kong
De Gruyter Open
01.12.2017
De Gruyter Poland Sciendo |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Taking “sluicing” to be derived by movement + deletion, as represented by
, and “pseudo-sluicing” to be a base-generated structure [
(+
) +
] (going by
; Adams 2004), this paper reviews arguments for and against the presence of a sluicing construction in Mandarin Chinese. We show that all the tests available in the literature do not argue against the presence of such a sluicing construction, except the test building on the distribution of the copula
. Unfortunately, the
test is demonstrated to be uncertain and it cannot be used to argue conclusively that only a base-generation pseudo-sluicing analysis should be adopted. We show that a much clear evidence for an exclusive pseudo-sluicing analysis comes from the behavior of the sprouting construction. Investigation of sprouting also sheds light on the properties of null arguments, topic-variable relation, locality, and subcategorization of verbs in the language. |
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ISSN: | 1017-1274 2470-8275 1017-1274 |
DOI: | 10.1515/scl-2017-0004 |