The Syntax of Sluicing in Yoruba
Keywords:
sluicing, ellipsis, wh-movement, preposition-stranding, MPAbstract
This paper examines sluicing as a phenomenon in Yorùba syntax which interacts between ellipsis and wh-movement. The paper shows that the movement approach to sluicing is adequately appropriate to analyse sluiced expressions in Yoruba, as opposed to the non-movement approach. For our analysis, the Minimalist Program (MP) is adopted. Its basic operations are centred on economy and operations merge which target movement of features relevant for convergent computation. Our findings show that there is connectivity between the sluiced expression and the non-elliptical structure. These connectivity effects include feature matching of case and preposition-stranding parallelisms. These parallels in distribution are immediately and straightforwardly accounted for by the deletion theory of sluicing, since the grammatical constraints that regulate case on wh-phrases and the possibility of extracting a wh-phrase from a PP, will be operative uniformly in both elliptical and non-elliptical structures. This paper shows how that Wh-operator moves from the elliptical structure into the non-elliptical expression, obeying the Shortest Move constraint and consequently, demonstrates how ellipsis is achieved.
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