On Certain Adjacency Effects in Ellipsis Contexts

Abstract

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.

Reduced NP comparatives in Korean and their implications

“… 18 It has been proposed in the literature that there are instances where deletion can actually target non-constituents (Abe 2016 ; An 2007 , 2016 , 2018 , 2019 ; Mukai 2003 , Ott and Struckmeier 2016 , 2018 , Sato and Maeda 2018 , among others). However, this does not mean that deletion is unconstrained.…”

“…However, this does not mean that deletion is unconstrained. For instance, An ( 2019 ) argues that deleted elements have to form a consecutive string due to independent requirements on PF. Therefore, the configuration in (55) cannot be accepted as is under An’s approach to deletion.…”