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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?

| Meertens Institute
| Universität Konstanz

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
Published online: 27 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00035.bro
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