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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Bibliographic Details
Published inZhongguo yu wen yan jiu Vol. 38; no. 2; pp. 63 - 92
Main Authors Li, Yen-Hui Audrey, Wei, Ting-Chi
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hong Kong De Gruyter Open 01.12.2017
De Gruyter Poland
Sciendo
Subjects
Copulas
Mandarin
pseudo-sluicing
sluicing
sprouting
Syntactic movement
Syntactic structures
topic
variable
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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.
ISSN:1017-1274
2470-8275
1017-1274
DOI:10.1515/scl-2017-0004