Ellipsis licensing and redundancy reduction: A focus-based approach

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the characterization of the identity condition on sluicing. While the formulation of this condition remains an open issue, recent work suggests that sluices are anaphoric to an implicit question or issue that the antecedent raises in the discourse (Q-equivalence approaches, Ginzburg & Sag 2000; AnderBois 2011; 2014; 2016; Barros 2014; Weir 2014; Kotek & Barros 2018). We highlight several challenges to Q-equivalence accounts, and argue instead for a return to focus-based accounts (Rooth 1992a; Romero 1998; Fox 2000; Merchant 2001). Under such an approach, antecedents are importantly not responsible for raising any particular issue/question themselves, a point we show to be a critical challenge to Q-equivalence accounts. We propose instead that sluicing is possible provided that the antecedent and sluice have the same focus-theoretic propositional content. We show that this account is similar to, but improves upon, Merchant’s (2001) influential e-GIVENness account. We extend this account to cases of VP ellipsis, and moreover argue in support of the idea that the theory of ellipsis licensing should be integrated into a more general theory of redundancy reduction. In other words, that the semantic condition on identity in ellipsis is the same as the semantic condition on deaccenting (Rooth 1992a; Tancredi 1992). We propose a generalized condition on redundancy reduction, which may replace Schwarzschild’s (1999) GIVENness condition.

Keywords

• Sluicing
• identity conditions
• semantics
• focus
• question under discussion
• inquisitiveness
• inquisitive semantics
• anaphora to issues
• ellipsis