This study employs the island repair effect on the Left Branch Condition (LBC) to illuminate the derivation of Mandarin sluicing. It utilizes three unique properties of Mandarin island repair related to the LBC involving (i) covert antecedents, (ii) contrastive modifiers, and (iii) multiple islands including LBC structures in order to examine two deletion-based analyses of sluicing in the literature. It is shown that these analyses fail to satisfactorily explain the properties discussed. To capture the facts, a pseudosluicing analysis is proposed which claims that sluiced clauses in Mandarin are simply composed of a subject pro, an (optional) copula shi 'be', and a wh-in-situ wh-remnant serving as a predicate. The strong redemptive ability of repairing LBC effects in Mandarin is attributed to the construal of pro instead of deletion. From a typological point of view, among East Asian languages, Mandarin sluices differ from Japanese and Korean sluices in that the pro of the former cannot be interpreted as a concealed cleft structure but instead functions as an implicit subject.(iii) multiple islands involving the LBC. The paper evaluates two deletion-based analyses, the Focus condition analysis (Merchant 2001) and the multi-movement and deletion analysis (Wang 2007), and demonstrates that these analyses cannot satisfactorily explain the three concerned discrepancies and other fundamental properties in Mandarin sluicing, such as syntactic parallelism under deletion and the distribution of the copula shi 'be'. To capture these properties and patterns, a pseudosluicing analysis of sluicing in Mandarin (Wei 2004) is proposed, which explains the redemptive effect of the LBC in Mandarin via the construal of pro rather than deletion. In this sense, Mandarin sluicing is similar to pseudosluicing in English, is a base-generated structure consisting in a simple clause [pro (shi) wh-remnant], and is different from English deletion-based canonical sluicing. Additionally, it is claimed that Mandarin sluices are not concealed cleft structures resulting from argument ellipsis, unlike Japanese and Korean sluices (Nishiyama et al. 1996;Saito 2004Saito , 2007 Takahashi 2008a, b). It is proposed that the pro in Mandarin sluices can be reinterpreted as an E-type pro (Evans 1980), which explains the generation of sloppy identity readings. Quite generally, the analysis makes use of two well-established properties of Mandarin Chinese to explain its sluicing construction: the pro-drop nature of Chinese and topic-comment predication, and the fact that no new ad hoc stipulations are required in the analysis.The organization of this paper is as follows. Section 2 compares island repair effects in LBC structures in English with Mandarin Chinese. Section 3 reviews two potential deletion-centered accounts of sluicing and argues that they are not appropriate for Chinese. Section 4 then proposes the pseudosluicing analysis. Section 5 discusses the origin of the strong island/LBC repair effect in Mandarin Chinese. Section 6 further clarifies the ...
The derivational differences of the fragment answers in Mandarin Chinese lie in whether a fragment moves or not. Under the movement and ellipsis analysis (Merchant 2004), fragment answer towh-question moves to SpecFocP, followed by TP ellipsis. In contrast, fragment answer to yes-no question or for correction is a base-generated structure, [procopula fragment]. The analysis is supported not only by the existence of the copular verb and the fragment answers to questions involving the passive constructions and preposition stranding but also by cross-linguistic evidence.
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This paper argues that fragment question (FQ) in Mandarin Chinese is derived from topic movement and TP deletion, contributing to the growing body of evidence that sentence fragments are syntactically full clauses (Merchant 2004). Structurally, an FQ consists of a topic-like constituent followed by a particle ne, which functions as a topic marker and as a constituent question particle simultaneously. The fragment is argued to move to the SpecTopP rather than SpecFocP (Wei 2013), because FQ exhibits topic properties and respects island effects such as the complex NP island and the adjunct island. However, it is insensitive to islands such as the sentential subject island and left branch condition. We propose that the absence of island effect can be attributed to the pied-piping of the entire topic-like island to the SpecTopP. In addition, the proposed analysis not only captures the ineligible FQs caused by intervention effect within the passive structures but also the eligible FQs induced by preposition drop in the language.
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