Sentential coordination and ellipsis

In this paper we provide a syntactic analysis of free exceptive constructions headed by excepto and salvo (‘except’) in Spanish: Todos los estudiantes cantaron, {excepto/salvo} Juan (‘Every student sang, except John’). Our claim is that free exceptives are coordinated elliptical sentences attached to the CP level of a host clause that expresses a generalization statement. We frame our analysis in the Boolean Phrase Hypothesis (Munn 1993), and defend that exceptive markers head a Boolean Phrase, as other coordinating conjunctions do. We also argue that exceptive markers select for a full-fledged CP as complement, whose null C head triggers movement of an XP constituent to its Specifier position (Juan, in the example above) and also triggers a process of ellipsis in which all the syntactic material inside the TP selected by C is marked for PF-deletion, along the lines of Merchant (2003).