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In:Footprints of Phrase Structure: Studies in syntax in honour of Tim Stowell
Edited by María J. Arche, Jan-Wouter Zwart, Hamida Demirdache and Hagit Borer
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 288] 2025
► pp. 170–198

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Children’s sluices

Intervention and evasion

 | University of California, Los Angeles
Published online: 2 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.288.09hya
Abstract
In this paper we discuss English- and Mandarin-speaking children’s development of sluicing — a form of ellipsis. Our experimental results show that 3–6-year old children understand this kind of ellipsis. We also find significantly better performance with subject sluices than with object sluices for English-speaking children (at all ages) and Mandarin-speaking children (at ages 5–6 years). We argue that this ‘subject advantage’ is due to children’s difficulty with intervention structures. We propose that English-speaking children (and older Mandarin-speaking children) project pseudosluices as a way to evade intervention effects in object sluices. This is in line with recent ‘pseudosluice evasion’ analyses of “island repair” in sluicing and also sluicing in wh-in situ languages like Mandarin.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sluicing and intervention in child grammars
    • 2.1Intervention as a diagnostic of full structure/movement
    • 2.2English sluice experiment (Mateu & Hyams 2020, 2021)
    • 2.3Mandarin sluice experiment (Liu, Hyams & Mateu 2020, to appear)
    • 2.4Back to English: Sluicing vs. pseudosluicing?
  • 3.The evasion analysis
    • 3.1Island repair
    • 3.2Wh-in situ languages
    • 3.3Acquisition implications of evasion
  • 4.Testing the evasion hypothesis
    • 4.1Open questions
    • 4.2Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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