Sluicing is NOT in Korean

Abstract

In this paper, I claim that what appears to be a sluicing construction is a manifestation of the property of wh-words in Korean as indefinites that can serve as a question clause by combining with a question morpheme, contra to Takahashi (1993, 1994) and Nishiyama, Whitman, and Yi (1995). The present research thus shows that the status of wh-words as indefinites plays a crucial role in the so called sluicing construction as well as wh-questions involving intervention effect, and syntactic islands. It also has a nontrivial theoretical implication of supporting the thesis in Cheng (1997) that no language adopts more than one option of typing wh-questions, the question morpheme and displacement of a wh-word.