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Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2014
Edited by Anita Auer and Björn Köhnlein
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 31] 2014
► pp. 13–25

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The licensing condition on clausal ellipsis

 | Leiden University
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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: 10 November 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.31.02boo
This paper is concerned with the correct characterization of the licensing condition on clausal ellipsis and how it relates to the distribution of ellipsis. I argue, essentially following López (2000), that ellipsis is licensed when the ellipsis clause bears a relation to an antecedent in the discourse component. A relation between two discourse units can be established in two ways: (1) Either there holds a direct relation between the two discourse units or (2) there holds an anaphoric relation mediated by a discourse anaphor. In this paper, I show how this two-way distinction in setting up discourse relations accounts for the two-way split we find in the distribution of ellipsis.
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