Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2020
Edited by Elena Tribushinina and Mark Dingemanse
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 37] 2020
► pp. 23–37
Clausal ellipsis
Deletion or selective spell-out?
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 27 October 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00035.bro
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00035.bro
Abstract
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.
Keywords: clausal ellipsis, A′-movement, deletion, spell-out, discourse particles
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1The movement-and-deletion approach (MDA)
- 1.2The selective spell-out approach (SSA)
- 1.3The in-situ approach (ISA)
- 1.4Organization of the remainder of the paper
- 2.Why the in-situ approach fails?
- 3.Why the selective spell-out approach is superior?
- 4.The distribution of German discourse particles
- 5.Appendix: Two issues related to the Dutch discourse particle dan
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
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