Clausal Coordinate Ellipsis (CCE) 
in Hungarian compared to CCE 
in Dutch, German, and Estonian

Clausal Coordinate Ellipsis (CCE) is a frequent but relatively ill-understood grammatical phenomenon in written and spoken language. It involves the elision of one or more constituents that are shared by two or more coordinated clauses. In this paper, we study four types of CCE that occur in coordinations of two clauses: (1) Gapping (including Long Distance Gapping, Subgapping and Stripping), (2) Forward Conjunction Reduction (FCR), (3) Backward Conjunction Reduction (BCR), and (4) Subject Gap with Finite/Fronted Verb (SGF). In Gapping and its variants, at least the Head Verb of the second clause is deleted. FCR involves deletion of one or more left-peripheral major constituents of the second clause. In BCR, one or more right-peripheral (sub)constituents of the first clause are left out. SGF is deletion of the Subject of the second clause in case of Subject-Verb inversion within the first clause. We adopt the psycholinguistically motivated treatment of CCE by Kempen (2009). This theoretical framework was originally developed for CCE phenomena in two Indo-European languages (Dutch and German), and was shown to generalize, with very few amendments, to Estonian, a Finno-Ugric language. In the present paper, we show that the CCE treatment applies to Hungarian, another Finno-Ugric language, as well.

Published online: 25 September 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/atoh.13.04har