Sluicing and the Lexicon: The Point of No Return

Abstract

In this construction, an interrogative phrase appears stranded where one might have expected to find a complete constituent question. I will refer to the stranded interrogative phrase (e.g. what in (1a)) as the remnant, and to the missing portion of the constituent question (represented by _ ) as the elided IP. The two combine to form a constituent (in brackets) that I call the sluice. The content of the elided IP corresponds to the content of some other sentence in the discourse (e.g. the cats are eating something in (1a)), which I call the antecedent IP. Notice finally that the antecedent IP sometimes contains overt material corresponding to the remnant (e.g. something in (1a)); this overt material I refer to as the correlate. The contrast between sluicing constructions in which the remnant has an overt correlate and those in which it does not will be important below.