Link to WCCFL abstract at UCLA

This paper accounts for previously unknown facts involving the alleviation of islands in sluicing. It argues that sluicing does not alleviate islands and that cases reported as island alleviation actually involve a non-movement derivation in languages like Polish. Sluicing is no different than other types of Ellipsis (like VP ellipsis) in that it does not alleviate Island effects when we control for the availability of cleft constructions. I will assume that Sluicing requires semantic identity (Merchant 2000), but not syntactic identity. Similar effects will be discussed for Russian and German.