On the Licensing Condition on Sluicing: Evidence from Japanese

Recent studies on sluicing have been pursuing its licensing condition by examining mismatch phenomena in sluicing. The groundbreaking work was by Rudin, who proposes a syntactic licensing condition on sluicing through investigating mismatch phenomena. This paper aims to critically examine Rudin’s proposal by discussing novel Japanese data regarding mismatches in modality, polarity and verbs. We show that these data challenge Rudin’s proposal both conceptually and empirically and thus suggest that it needs to be re-examined. We then show that Kroll’s semantic licensing condition on sluicing captures the Japanese data in question and thus argue that the condition has a wider empirical coverage compared with Rudin’s proposal.