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

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

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