Sluicing as anaphora to issues

Abstract

Since Merchant 2001, it has been widely agreed that the licensing condition on Sluicing is at least partly semantic in nature. This paper argues that the relevant semantic condition is one of symmetric entailment over a semantics which includes not only truth-conditional information, but also issues in the sense of Groenendijk & Roelofsen 2009. One kind of evidence for the proposal comes from expressions like doubly-negated inde?nites and implicit passive agents which do not license Sluicing despite truth-conditional equivalence to overt inde?nites. In addition to these facts, the paper examines novel data which show that Sluicing is not licensed by even overt inde?nites inside of appositive relative clauses, arguing that these facts (and related facts regarding VP-Ellipsis) follow from the account together with an independently motivated semantics for appositives.