Bare Argument Ellipsis and Focus

Abstract

This monograph explores the syntax and information structure of bare argument ellipsis. The study concentrates on stripping, which is identified as a subtype of bare argument ellipsis typically associated with focus sensitive particles or negation. This monograph presents a unified account of stripping located at the syntax-information structure interface and argues for a licensing mechanism which is strongly tied to the focus properties of the construction. Under this view, types of bare argument ellipsis such as stripping and pseudostripping, which have received different treatments in the literature, are shown to be subject to the same licensing mechanism. This analysis is also extended to instances of bare argument ellipsis in embedded contexts, which have received little attention in the literature so far. Integrating theoretical and experimental reasoning, this study presents a series of experiments investigating the extraction, prosody and context properties of stripping and thus arrives at a comprehensive and unified account.

Ellipsis in Languages of the Caucasus

“…Sentences where the second conjunct contains negation, instead of a focus marker, such as in (20b) are also analyzed as stripping in the literature. Konietzko (2016) Dana speaks Danish but not Dani.…”

“…As argued in Barros & Vicente (2013) and Chaves (2014), RNR-like phenomena do not allow for a uniform analysis. 8 The putative German examples of embedded stripping in Konietzko (2016)…”