On island repairability of Japanese sluicing with non-finite complements

English sluicing is commonly analysed as a syntactic operation involving wh-movement followed by TP-deletion. For Japanese, which is a wh-in-situ language, due to its inability to explain the optional presence of copula, the wh-movement approach has heavily been criticised and theorists have instead opted for assimilating the underlying structure of the ellipsis site to that of a reduced wh-cleft. Takita (2009), however, reported that a specific variant of Japanese sluicing, that is, one with non-finite ‘control’ predicates that cannot select a copula as its complement, should be treated as an instance of genuine sluicing in Japanese. One of the three motivations for this claim is that his examples (labelled SLCNFC), unlike the traditional examples of Japanese sluicing (labelled SLCFC) presence of ‘island repair’ effects. The study explores this apparent discrepancy with regards to the island sensitivity of Japanese sluicing, which I believe had largely been ignored and understudied in subsequent literature. Crucially, with additional novel examples whose meaningful interpretation necessitate syntactic island violation, I will show that island cannot still be repaired even in SLCNFC, contrary to what Takita reports. Whilst this at first appears to be problematic to Takita’s account, nevertheless, my informants also mostly replicated his judgements for his other two observations: (i) clause-types, and (ii) P-stranding. Taking this into consideration, I will suggest that the commonly acknowledged assumption that sluicing repairs islands might potentially need to be challenged, and at least for Japanese, it will have to be questioned.