Attention and Locality: On Clause-Boundedness and Its Exceptions in Multiple Sluicing

Abstract

We provide an account of clause-boundedness in multiple sluicing that also captures its exceptions. Clause-boundedness arises whenever an embedded clause’s subject is not coreferential with a topical discourse referent in the embedding clause. Our account ties clause-boundedness to discourse factors. We discuss implementations that import sensitivity to information structure into the syntax, and compare our approach with recent work—in particular, Grano and Lasnik 2018 and “short source” accounts (most recently, Abels and Dayal 2017, 2021)—and demonstrate that these accounts both under- and overgenerate. The empirical coverage of our account argues against purely syntacticized agreement-based approaches to clause-boundedness.