On Identity Condition And Island Repair Of Sluicing In English

This thesis focuses on Sluicing in English in respect of its identity condition and island repair. Three questions have been discussed: (i) How is Sluicing represented? (ii) How is Sluicing interpreted? (iii) Why does Sluicing repair island?The first question concerns the derivation of Sluicing. Adopting the PF Deletion Approach, I argue that Sluicing is derived by PF deletion of a fully pronounced IP, out of which a wh-phrase has moved. The convincing arguments for the approach come from form-identity effects on case matching and preposition stranding in numerous languages around the world.To answer the second question I propose a "semantic + weak syntactic identity condition" on Sluicing, by arguing that syntactic identity condition is too strong and semantic condition is over-predictive. A weaker form of syntactic identity I suggest is Feature Identity, which regulates that every feature in the numeration of the elided IP must be identical to the one in the numeration of the antecedent IP.The third question concerns an important nature of Sluicing---island repair. Island constraints seem to be violated with grammatical Sluicing sentences, where wh-movement is involved. Adopting a more recent approach, namely Cyclic Linearization, I propose that PF deletion can have a saving effect by deleting all ordering statements in IP, including the conflicting statements that result from non-successive-cyclic movement of wh-phrase out of certain islands to the highest [Spec, CP]. The derivation will be salvaged with the contradiction of statements being cancelled by deleting all ordering statements in IP. Two arguments concerning Complex NP Constraint (relative clause) and Adjunct Island support my proposal.In addition, I adopt the Scope Parallelism to rule out the ungrammatical Sluicing sentences with implicit correlates and focused correlates, which do not exhibit island repair effects.