Adjectival sluices in Hungarian
- PDF / 805,801 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 85 Downloads / 184 Views
Adjectival sluices in Hungarian An argument for isomorphic sources Eszter Ronai1 · Laura Stigliano1
Received: 14 June 2019 / Accepted: 11 March 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Hungarian adjectival sluices show agreement characteristics of predicative adjectives, even though the correlate of the adjective is in attributive position. This has been taken as evidence for the existence of non-isomorphic (i.e. copular/cleft) sources for the ellipsis site. However, such an analysis could only capture the distribution of apparent case-mismatches by positing copular sources for a subset of Hungarian sluices—a conceptually unappealing state of affairs. Instead we provide a more parsimonious analysis, which predicts the data without needing to posit exceptional sources. In particular, we argue for the existence of two different configurations: (1) one involving isomorphic wh-sources followed by ellipsis, and (2) one that does not involve ellipsis at all, but is rather a case of pseudosluicing. Pseudosluicing is the combination of a null subject and a null copula—elements that are independently available in the language, and whose restricted distribution explains constraints we observe on the distribution of pseudosluicing. Thus, on our analysis, only isomorphic wh-questions are possible sources for Hungarian sluicing structures, consistent with the most restrictive theories of elliptical identity. Keywords Sluicing · Ellipsis · Hungarian
1 Introduction In this paper, we provide a novel analysis for Hungarian adjectival sluices. We show that non-isomorphic sources (i.e. full cleft/copular clauses) are not possible sources Authors contributed equally to this work and are listed alphabetically.
B E. Ronai
[email protected] L. Stigliano [email protected]
1
The University of Chicago, 1115 E. 58th Street, Rosenwald Hall, Room #224, 60637, Chicago, IL, USA
E. Ronai, L. Stigliano
for the ellipsis site, and instead provide evidence for an isomorphic wh-source analysis. In doing so, we argue against recent literature on this topic that has proposed that the ellipsis site does not need to be an isomorphic wh-question, but could instead be a non-isomorphic copular question. We take as our starting point that an ellipsis site contains structure that is deleted or left unpronounced—see Merchant (2018) for an overview of the evidence for this claim. More broadly, this paper contributes to the debate about the identity of the structure inside an ellipsis site. Hungarian adjectival sluices show agreement characteristics of predicative adjectives, even when the correlate is in attributive position, as shown in (1):1 (1) Mari ismer néhány magas lány-t, de nem tudom milyen girl-ACC, but not know.I how Mary knows some tall magas-*(ak) . tall-*(PL) ‘Mary knows some tall girls, but I don’t know how tall.’ Such data have been taken as evidence for the existence of non-isomorphic sources for the ellipsis site. i.e. for cleft/copular sources2 (see Barros 2016 for Hungarian, Barros 2014 for German, and Merchant 2001 for D
Data Loading...
