Polarity reversals under sluicing

Authors

  • Margaret Kroll

Abstract

This paper presents novel English sluicing data that challenge even the most successful existing theories of the relationship between antecedent and elided content in sluicing constructions. The data supply robust evidence for a previously unobserved phenomenon in which the elided content and the antecedent content in a sluiced construction contain opposite polarity. The phenomenon challenges current accounts of identity conditions on ellipsis by demonstrating that a greater mismatch between antecedent and elided content is possible than previously thought; specifically, the paper shows that the identity condition for sluicing must be sensitive to pragmatic as well as to semantic content. This observation motivates a proposal in which sluicing is treated as a pragmatics-sensitive phenomenon licensed by local contextual entailment.

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How to Cite

Kroll, M. (2019). Polarity reversals under sluicing. Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 21(2), 713–730. Retrieved from https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/163