Article published in:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2020Edited by Elena Tribushinina and Mark Dingemanse
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 37] 2020
► pp. 23–37
Clausal ellipsis
Deletion or selective spell-out?
Hans Broekhuis | Meertens Institute
Josef Bayer | 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
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00035.bro
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00035.bro
References
Bayer, Josef
Bayer, Josef, and Hans-Georg Obenauer
Bhattacharya, Tanmoy, and Andrew Simpson
Boone, Enrico
Broekhuis, Hans
Broekhuis, Hans, and Norbert Corver
2019 Syntax of Dutch. Coordination and Ellipsis. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25972. 

Den Dikken, Marcel
Hentschel, Elke
Kayne, Richard S.
Merchant, Jason