Exceptional Sluicing Cases in Japanese

Abstract

It has been standardly assumed since the seminal work of Ross (1969) and the extensive study by Merchant (2001) that English sluicing is a result of WH-movement to COMP followed by TP-deletion. Thus the second conjunct of (1a) is considered to be like (1b).

(1) a. Somebody just left -- guess who.
b. Guess [CP who [TP t just left]].

Japanese sluicing, on the other hand, is assumed to involve a cleft structure by many authors, including Nishiyama, Whitman, and Yi (1996) and Kuwabara (1997). Their chief motivation comes from the optional presence of a copula.

(2) Mary-ga nanika-o katta rasii ga, boku-wa
Mary-NOM something-ACC bought likely but I-TOP
[nani-o (da) ka] wakaranai.
what-ACC COP Q not-know
It is likely that Mary bought something, but I don't know what.

In (2), the question marker ka can be preceded by the copula da, which makes it difficult to maintain a WH-movement analysis (Takahashi 1994). The cleft approach seems superior in this respect and it conforms to the fact that Japanese is a non-WH-movement language. In this study, I show that there are cases in Japanese where the cleft analysis fails and the English type of analysis is applicable.