Polarity reversals under sluicing

Abstract

1. Overview Sluicing, first noted by Ross (1969), is an ellipsis phenomenon in which the TP of an interrogative is elided, stranding an overt wh-phrase in the CP domain. 1) Bernie knows that someone in Iowa voted for Trump, but he doesn't know who [ TP t in Iowa voted for Trump] E . This project presents novel English data in which the elided content and the antecedent content in a sluiced construction contain opposite polarity. 2) I don't think that Trump i will comply with the debate requirements, but I don't know why [ TP he i won't comply with the debate requirements] E . Main Contributions: ö The data challenge current accounts of identity conditions on sluicing. They demonstrate that a greater mismatch between antecedent and elided content is possible than previously thought. ö The project shows that a complete theory of sluicing must account for the ability of pragmatically and contextually enriched meanings to serve as antecedents in sluicing constructions. A methodological prologue: The corpus examples given here were identified by undergraduate annotators trained by the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project and were verified by graduate students and faculty working on the Ellipsis project. Many examples presented have more than one possible interpretation for the pre-sluice. The claim is not that the pre-sluices provided here are the only interpretation available for each example, but merely that they are felicitous, freely available interpretations. 1 Thank you to Pranav Anand, Rachelle Boyson, and Jim McCloskey for bringing this phenomenon to my attention and for inspiring/providing much of the project's data. Thank you to Pranav Anand, Bill Ladusaw, and Jim McCloskey for invaluable discussion of the ideas presented here. Finally, thank you to the undergraduate annotators of the Santa Cruz Ellipsis Project for their work in classifying the original corpus data and to the participants of the