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Island repair effects of the Left Branch Condition in Mandarin Chinese

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Abstract

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.

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  1. Institute of Taiwanese Cultures and Languages, Normal Kaohsiung Normal University, No.116, Ho-Ping first Rd., Kaohsiung City, 80201, Taiwan

    Ting-Chi Wei

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Wei, TC. Island repair effects of the Left Branch Condition in Mandarin Chinese. J East Asian Linguist 20, 255–289 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-011-9077-0

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