Parallelism in Amis Sluicing

Abstract

本文論證，嚴格的句法平行限制無法解釋，阿美語切割句實際所表現出來的詞彙與句法之不對稱現象。基於此語言事實，我們提出利用語意同形及焦點刪略（Merchant 2001）的概念，來解釋這種因IP/VP-刪除所造成的不平行現象；即藉由準分裂切割句之IP-刪除及連謂切割句之VP-刪除，將阿美語之切割結構統整為一種句法上先主題化再刪除的句式，語意上則完全遵守e-GIVENness之相互蘊涵原則以及焦點條件之刪除原則，並排除所謂詞彙、句法折衷方案之分析（Chung 2005a）。

This paper argues that the view from stricter syntactic parallelism fails to explain why sluicing in Amis can tolerate morphological and structural mismatches caused by argument structure alternations or pseudocleft/non-pseudocleft distinction as well as a violation of the generalization on preposition stranding (Merchant 2001). Building on these facts, we propose that all these mismatches can be captured by semantic isomorphism entertained by Merchant (2001), i.e. the Focus condition on IP-ellipsis with some extension to VP-ellipsis. Both conditions are incorporated to cope with the IP-ellipsis of the pseudocleft sluice and the VP-ellipsis of the serial verb sluice in Amis. Structurally, the whole sluice clause is unanimously topicalized in Amis before the ellipsis of IP or VP within the base-generated sluice interrogatives. Theoretically, Amis sluicing strictly adheres to the mutual entailment of e-GIVENness, while the eclectic lexico-syntactic approach adopted by Chung (2005a) is untenable.