Multiple Sluicing in English

Multiple Sluicing in English ∗ Myung-Kwan Park and Jung-Min Kang Department of English, Dongguk University 3-ga 26, Pil-dong, Chung-gu, Seoul, 100-715, Korea parkmk@dongguk.edu,shinyminny@hanmail.net Abstract. This paper explores the nature of multiple sluicing in English, which has two or more remnant wh-phrases in clause edge position. At the beginning part of the paper we argue against Nishigauchi's (1998) and Lasnik's (2007) Gapping analysis of multiple sluicing, which says that two remnant wh-phrases each actually occupies the left and right edge of a clause, with the in-between string of words undergoing Gapping. We rather argue that multiple sluicing in English is the same kind as found in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. In other words, multiple sluicing in English is also derived by multiple wh-fronting which otherwise does not apply. We demonstrate that some important properties of the construction noted by Lasnik (2007) under the Gapping approach to it can be accounted for in a principled way by our proposed analysis. Keywords: multiple sluicing, multiple wh-movement/fronting, sluicing, TP/IP-deletion, multiple pair or pair-list reading, Gapping, rightward focus movement, Wh-QP interaction, locality, clause-boundedness 1. Introduction Human languages enjoy the common rule of economy: when some word or words are repeated, we do not verbally pronounce what is repeated. This linguistic phenomenon is called ellipsis or, in more technical terms, deletion, which is to delete or suppress the phonological features of repeated word/words in the course of syntactic derivation. Deletion is known to be rather widely available to the relevant contexts in English. It has been noted that there are three types of ellipsis depending on what constituent undergoes deletion: (i) VP ellipsis (or maybe vP ellipsis); (ii) NP ellipsis (in the DP system); (iii) T/IP ellipsis. What draws particular attention recently among the three types of ellipsis is the last kind, where wh-movement is mandatory before TP is elided. T/IP ellipsis or what Ross (1969) calls sluicing is illustrated by the following example: (1) John met someone, but I don't know [CP [who] [TP John met t]] The fact that wh-movement feeds sluicing raises a question of whether in contrast to English with single wh-fronting, multiple sluicing (sluicing with multiple survivors) is possible in languages with multiple wh-fronting. Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, which allow for multiple wh-fronting, make a test case for this question, and indeed multiple sluicing is attested in these two languages as follows: (2) Njakoj vidja njakogo, no ne znam [koj] [kogo] [vidja] Bulgarian someone saw someone, but not I-know who whom saw Richards (1997) (3) Neko je vidio nekog, ali ne znam [ko] [koga] [je vidio] Serbo-Croatian someone is seen someone, but not I-know who whom is seen Stjepanovic (2003) * Copyright 2007 by Myung-Kwan Park and Jung-Min Kang 394 Returning to English, a question that arises is whether multiple sluicing is allowed in non-multiple wh-fronting languages like English. Bearing on this question, Bolinger (1978:109) reports several examples like (4), which is quite similar in appearance to those involving multiple sluicing as in Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. (4) I know that in each instance …

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