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oa Clausal ellipsis
Deletion or selective spell-out?
- Source: Linguistics in the Netherlands, Volume 37, Issue 1, Oct 2020, p. 23 - 37
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- 27 Oct 2020
Abstract
Abstract
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.