Bare Wh-stripping in Japanese

This paper focuses on clausal ellipsis, in particular sluicing and stripping, in Japanese. In the literature, two derivational options have been proposed for Japanese sluicing: (I) the movement of the remnant, followed by TP-deletion (Takahashi in J East Asian Linguist 3: 265–300, 1994), and (II) the deletion of the presuppositional clause of the cleft construction (Saito in Nanzan Linguist 1: 21–50, 2004). The mixed properties of sluicing suggest that Japanese sluicing has multiple derivational sources. This paper argues for this hybrid approach to sluicing, by examining another and yet-unnoticed type of clausal ellipsis: the stripping construction that includes a wh-remnant with focus interpretation. We argue that wh-stripping also has multiple derivational sources, namely, focus movement of the remnant wh-phrase followed by TP-deletion and the cleft construction, as in the case of sluicing. By examining negative polarity items, islands, and quantifier scope interactions, we show that wh-stripping in Japanese exhibits mixed syntactic properties, and we put forth our proposal that this makes it hard to narrow down its derivational path to a single construction.