Clausal ellipsis: Deletion of selective spell-out?

TY - JOUR

T1 - Clausal ellipsis

T2 - Deletion of selective spell-out?

AU - Broekhuis, Hans

AU - Bayer, Josef

PY - 2020/10

Y1 - 2020/10

N2 - This article compares two alternatives to the standard movement-and-deletion approach to clausal ellipsis, which postulates deletion of TP after the remnants of ellipsis are (sometimes exceptionally) A'-moved into the left periphery of the clause. One alternative is the in-situ approach, which denies the involvement of movement in the derivation of clausal ellipsis; it claims that clausal ellipsis can apply to any run-of-the-mill syntactic structure and simply deletes the familiar/given information from the propositional domain of the clause. Another alternative is the selective spell-out approach; it denies the involvement of deletion and states that the remnants undergo regular A'-movement into the specifiers of specific semantically relevant functional projections (CP, FocusP, NegP, etc.), which are subsequently selected for spell-out. This article argues that the selective spell-out approach is superior to the two deletion approaches.

AB - This article compares two alternatives to the standard movement-and-deletion approach to clausal ellipsis, which postulates deletion of TP after the remnants of ellipsis are (sometimes exceptionally) A'-moved into the left periphery of the clause. One alternative is the in-situ approach, which denies the involvement of movement in the derivation of clausal ellipsis; it claims that clausal ellipsis can apply to any run-of-the-mill syntactic structure and simply deletes the familiar/given information from the propositional domain of the clause. Another alternative is the selective spell-out approach; it denies the involvement of deletion and states that the remnants undergo regular A'-movement into the specifiers of specific semantically relevant functional projections (CP, FocusP, NegP, etc.), which are subsequently selected for spell-out. This article argues that the selective spell-out approach is superior to the two deletion approaches.

KW - ellpsis

KW - sluiding

KW - gapping

KW - discourse particle

U2 - 10.1075/avt.00035.bro

DO - 10.1075/avt.00035.bro

M3 - Article

SN - 0929-7332

JO - Linguistics in the Netherlands

JF - Linguistics in the Netherlands

ER -