Abstract.  In this paper, I discuss the distribution of null complementizer clauses in English. I argue that two factors are interwoven to yield the observed distribution: first, unlike what is standardly assumed, not only the emptiness of C but also that of Spec,CP matters; second, the relevant clauses are obligatorily parsed as separate intonational phrases. I show that these properties lead to a new generalization that can be derived from independent assumptions about the syntax‐phonology interface, according to which an intonational phrase whose boundary cannot be properly demarcated is disallowed in PF. I argue that this is exactly why null complementizer clauses are ruled out in certain syntactic positions. I also discuss a parallelism between intonational phrases and the notion of phase proposed by Chomsky (2000, 2001).

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In this article, I show that crosslinguistically, there is a recurring pattern in various ellipsis constructions (e.g., fragment answers, right-dislocation, right-node raising, VP-ellipsis), to the effect that parts of a remnant can be additionally deleted under adjacency to a deletion site, often ignoring constituency. I argue that the phenomenon in question follows from the fact that PF deletion, being an operation in the component determining linear order, targets linearized strings, similarly to the fact that movement, being an operation in the component determining hierarchical relations, targets constituents.

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