Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Sluicing is claimed to fix island violations (e.g. Ross 1967, Merchant 2001, Lasnik 2001 etc.), but island violations do not even seem to be derivable under the current phase theory. If islands are indeed a consequence of the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2001, 2002 etc.), then sluicing could not fix them, simply because they are underivable and would not even be in the derivation to be fixed. It seems that there are two options to save this: one can either change the theory (cf. Müller 2011) or one can try to understand the sluicing data differently. We will attempt the latter. There are many instances where the expected island violation is not fixed. One such violation is preposition stranding (cf. Merchant 2001), but there are also many others. We will point to a number of such cases, ultimately arguing that they show that the current understanding of the sluicing structures cannot be fully correct. 

-