Sluicing-Like Phenomena and the Location of CP is Ossetic

This paper undertakes an investigation of sluicing phenomena in Digor and Iron Ossetic. I argue that, despite the very unusual word order - wh-phrases and certain complementizers are all placed clause-internally, in the immediately preverbal position, Ossetic exhibits overt wh-movement to Spec CP. Specifically, I show that what resembles sluicing in Ossetic, actually satisfies the standard tests for sluicing described in the literature. Under the assumption that deletion approaches to sluicing are on the right track, this allows applying to the Ossetic data the well-known analysis of sluicing proposed in Merchant (2001). Here, I will not explore the possibility that non-deletion approaches may fare better in the accounting for sluicing-related phenomena, but I will lay out some facts from Ossetic that seem to militate against this latter line of reasoning.