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Part of
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXIV–XXV: Papers from the annual symposia on Arabic Linguistics. Texas, 2010 and Arizona, 2011
Edited by Samira Farwaneh and Hamid Ouali
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 1] 2014
► pp. 207–228

Modes of interrogatives entail modes of sluicing

Evidence from Emirati Arabic

| United Arab Emirates University

Recent studies of sluicing as an elliptical construction are divided with respect to how the bare wh-word in the sluicing clause (i.e. wh-sluice) manifests its expected grammatical properties on the one hand, and receives its semantic interpretation on the other hand. In this paper, I investigate Emirati Arabic (ea) sluicing and conclude that ea sluicing should be analyzed as tp-deletion from an underlying wh-construction, at the level of pf. This supports the pf-deletion approach (Ross 1969, Merchant 2001) and argues against the lf-copying approach (Chung, Ladusaw and McCloskey 1995, 2006, Chung 2005) to sluicing. Moreover, I demonstrate that the ea sluicing source is predetermined by the type of wh-construction in ea. ea allows two types of wh-constructions, namely wh-fronting and wh-clefts. Both wh-strategies, while morphosyntactically distinct, are fully attested in the formation of sluicing. This paper also claims that the typology of wh-constructions has a direct impact on the typology of sluicing.

Published online: 29 August 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.1.13leu
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