Null Complement Anaphora

Abstract

In this chapter, the different positions regarding NCA in the literature are discussed and the analysis proposed in Hankamer and Sag (1976) is favored. NCA is taken to be a type of deep anaphor as opposed to a surface anaphor, in Hankamer and Sag’s proposed typology. It behaves like a deep anaphor in that it can take pragmatic antecedents, missing antecedents, and does not seem to require strict syntactic parallelism with its antecedent. In addition, NCA does not allow overt or covert extraction out of it, which provides evidence in favor of the view that NCA is to be represented as an element with no internal syntactic structure. It is also shown that the types of predicates that select NCA seem to be lexically determined, since no reliable pattern has yet been found to be able to predict which predicates select it.

When Ellipsis Can Save Defectiveness and When It Can’t

“…The fact that the gapped verb has to be isomorphic with the one in the antecedent suggests that in (3b) the gap is syntactically active. 5 The same pattern arises in other types of ellipsis in which the relevant testing environments can be constructed-for example, stripping constructions (Depiante 2000, Merchant 2004, Nakao 2009 and comparative deletion (Chomsky 1977, Kennedy 2002, Lechner 2018.…”

Tacit but understood? A first immersion in ellipsis in Argentine colloquial interaction

“…Aunque el interés en este campo está aumentando gradualmente para el español (p. ej., BOSQUE, 1984;BRUCART, 1987BRUCART, , 1999GUILLÉN, 1998;DEPIANTE, 2000, SAAB, 2008EGUREN, 2008;GALLEGO, 2011, y los autores mencionados anteriormente), en la tradición hispanohablante la elipsis todavía puede percibirse como un fenómeno insuficientemente examinado, en particular con respecto al lenguaje hablado, ya que los ejemplos proporcionados en la literatura orientada al español a menudo son meros calcos de ejemplos prototípicos del inglés (cf. infra).…”

“…Un inconveniente, sin embargo, es que los análisis, por lo general, se llevaron a cabo recurriendo a ejemplos derivados del inglés, así como a terminología anglófona calcada (hueco < gap, resto < remnant, vaciado < gapping, seudovaciado < pseudogapping, desnudamiento < stripping, seudodesnudamiento < pseudostripping, truncamiento < sluicing, seudotruncamiento < pseudosluicing, fragmentos < fragments, anáfora de complemento nulo < null complement anaphora, respuesta corta < short answer, islas sintácticas < syntactic islands, etc., cf. BOSQUE, 1984;BRUCART, 1999;GALLEGO, 2011;EGUREN, 2008;DEPIANTE, 2000DEPIANTE, , 2004, lo cual puede ser insuficiente para una lengua tipológicamente diferente como es el español. En el contexto de la necesidad de investigaciones empíricas, parece, pues, necesario estudiar la elipsis sobre datos reales; estrategia que permitiría identificar nuevos aspectos (véase GALLEGO, 2011: 81 y ss.)…”

THE SYNTAX OF TWO TYPES OF GAPPING IN SPANISH*

“…However, there is no obvious reason why this should be so; it is not easy to find a good reason to prevent verb raising only in gapping and not in other ellipsis contexts, in particular considering that the primary role of PRO under Brucart's analysis was to substitute the verb (or the VP) in the syntax. Traditionally, it has been assumed that the absence of VP-ellipsis in Spanish is attributed to verb raising (Zagona 1988(Zagona , L opez 1994, whereby predicate ellipsis equivalent to English VPellipsis is always expressed in the form of (polarity) stripping which is claimed to involve clausal ellipsis (Depiante 2000, Vicente 2006). In this respect, for Brucart's PRO-analysis to be sustained, the lack of verb raising needs to somehow be justified in gapping contexts.…”