This paper provides novel evidence that ellipsis can target bound morphemes. The evidence comes from suspended affixation of case markers in alternative questions in Digor and Iron Ossetic. The current literature on alternative questions (e.g. Does Mary like coffee or tea?) proposes that in many languages they are derived by disjunction of and ellipsis in constituents as large as a vP or even as a CP. Language-specific evidence in favor of such structure of alternative questions is available for Ossetic as well. Accordingly, the ostensible disjuncts coffee or tea do not actually form a constituent and case must be separately assigned to each of the DPs. Therefore, a case suffix shared under suspended affixation cannot attach to the orP as a whole. A deletion-based analysis can successfully derive the properties of suspended affixation in Ossetic alternative questions. I advance a specific proposal that incorporates ellipsis into the Distributed Morphology derivation.
In this squib, I provide evidence of a novel type in favor of the existence of the DP in previously undiscussed articleless languages: I show that a comitative preposition in the Ossetic languages cannot attach to nominal expressions that would be analyzed as DPs in better studied languages. On the other hand, nominal expressions that it can attach to are of the kinds that would be analyzed as bare NumPs.
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