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date: 14 February 2025

Ellipsis in the Syntax of Rioplatense Spanishlocked

Ellipsis in the Syntax of Rioplatense Spanishlocked

  • Andrés SaabAndrés SaabConsejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (CONCIET) & University of Buenos Aires

Summary

Ellipsis is an operation of grammar that leaves part of a phrase unpronounced. Languages vary regarding the type of elliptical phrases they allow. Spanish presents a rich variety oftense phrase ellipses (TP-ellipsis) in the sentential domain that are also attested in many other languages (sluicing, stripping, gapping, and fragment answers). In addition, this language also licenses elliptical constructions that are more restricted cross-linguistically. One of such constructions is ellipsis with clitic left dislocated remnants, a kind of ellipsis licensed by the polarity head in which the remnant (or remnants) is a contrastive clitic left dislocated topic. The behavior of clitics within the ellipsis site is compared with doubling clitics in fragment answers and gapping to draw some conclusions regarding the nature of clitic doubling in Rioplatense Spanish. Now, in contrast with its great variety of sentential ellipses, Spanish does not make use of lower ellipses; in particular, it lacks verbal ellipses (VP-ellipsis) with auxiliary or verb stranding, which are attested in languages like English or Portuguese. This absence of verbal ellipsis is correlated with the lack of verbal phrase (VP) fronting. Other attested elliptical constructions in the sentential domain, modal ellipsis and predicate ellipsis (PredP-ellipsis,i.e., ellipsis of the complement of copular verbs), correlate with the possibility of fronting the complement of the relevant modal or of the Predicate Phrase. In the nominal domain, ellipsis of the entire nominal phrase (NP-ellipsis) is the most productive ellipsis in Spanish. The construction shares all the properties of the so-called non-local anaphora (e.g., English VP-ellipsis or pseudo-gapping); that is, it can occur long-distance, across the discourse and in a variety of embedded clauses, including syntactic islands. Nominal features like gender and number behave differently under NP-ellipsis: whereas number features in the ellipsis site can mismatch with number features in the antecedent, gender features must be identical in the ellipsis site and in the antecedent. Certain instances of NP-ellipsis in Rioplatense Spanish show that the case feature of the elided noun can also vary with respect to the case feature of the noun in the antecedent.

Subjects

  • Linguistic Theories
  • Morphology
  • Syntax

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