P-stranding under sluicing and repair by ellipsis: Why is Indonesian (not) special?

Abstract

This paper presents novel evidence that P-stranding in Indonesian contradicts Merchant's (The syntax of silence: sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis, 2001) generalization that P-stranding under sluicing is possible only in those languages that allow this option under regular wh-movement. It is proposed that this apparently special pattern is accounted for by the recent idea of repair by ellipsis (Ross, in Binnick et al. (eds.) Papers from the 5th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1969; Merchant, The syntax of silence: sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis; Lasnik, M: Kim and Strauss (eds.) Proceedings of NELS 31, 2001). Specifically, the failure of percolation of the wh-feature is repaired by PF deletion. P-stranding in French and German cannot be so repaired since the violation in question is a strictly computational violation caused by D-to-P incorporation. Our cross-linguistic examination of P-stranding suggests a bifurcated view of violations (Boeckx and Lasnik in Linguistic Inquiry 37: 150-155, 2006); violations pertaining to the syntax-phonology interface in principle can be repaired whereas violations incurred within the syntactic computation cannot. This contrast in "reparability" naturally falls out from a minimalist architecture of the syntax-phonology interface. A broader implication of the present analysis is that syntax is itself not a crash-proof system in the sense of Frampton and Gutmann (Syntax 2:1-27, 1999; Derivation and explanation in the minimalist program. Blackwell, Oxford, 2002); it could produce certain operational failures, but language-particular parameters afford a bit of leeway for PF to remedy them at the syntax-phonology interface. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.