Ellipsis in Languages of the Caucasus

Abstract

This chapter deals with ellipsis, a phenomenon whereby some expected material goes missing in an utterance. The chapter overviews types of ellipsis frequently addressed in the literature: ellipsis in the noun phrase; argument omission; VP ellipsis; modal complement ellipsis; ellipsis in complex predicates; gapping, pseudogapping, and right node raising; ellipsis in comparative constructions, stripping; and ellipsis involving negation, sluicing and its generalizations, and fragment answers. It proceeds to review the occurrence of, and peculiarities exhibited by, these ellipsis varieties in a sample of the languages of the Caucasus. A number of ellipsis varieties that have not been earlier discussed in the literature but are present in some languages of the Caucasus are addressed as well. The data show that the languages of the Caucasus do not show a uniform typological profile as far as ellipsis is concerned. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the relevance of the presented data for theories of ellipsis.

Flexible syntax–prosody mapping of Intonational Phrases in the context of varying verb height

“…All Ossetic speakers in North Ossetia also speak Russian. The analysis of clausal syntax we adopt here expands the proposal sketched in Borise & Erschler (2021) and draws upon the description in Erschler (2012Erschler ( , 2020.…”

“…Smaller phrases are mostly head-final. Iron Ossetic is morphologically complex, mostly suffixing, with a rich case system, an inventory of aspectual prefixes, and a sophisticated system of pronominal and adverbial second-position clitics (Erschler 2020).…”

“…Ossetic has a well-articulated left periphery, which houses several types of constituents, including topics, narrow foci, wh-phrases, and negative indefinites (Erschler 2012(Erschler , 2020. The latter three constituent types share the following property: descriptively, each of them must appear in the immediately preverbal position (in the absence of another element with the same requirement).…”