Syntactic Diagnostics for Extraction of Focus from Ellipsis Site

This chapter argues that extraction from ellipsis site is restricted to Contrastive Focus (F). Since contrastive focus movement is island sensitive, remnants which are derived by movement must be island sensitive. Recent theories of the variable island repair phenomenon have focused on the puzzle that wh‐extraction out of a relative clause island seems to be possible where sluicing applies, but not in other ellipses. The assumption in PF‐deletion accounts is that the offending trace in sluicing is deleted at PF. The questionis that if offending traces are deleted at PF in sluicing, why doesn’t this also hold for VP‐ellipsis? Four diagnostics are developed: remnants of contrastive ellipses must involve a contrastive focus; remnants of contrastive ellipses are island sensitive; focus movement out of contrastive ellipsis must move the complete focus phrase not only the contrastive focus; remnants must obey the parallelism constraint. Evidence comes from sluicing and other cases of contrastive ellipses.