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No N-raising out of NPs in Spanish: ellipsis as a diagnostic of head movement

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel test for diagnosing head movement across languages, based on the availability of X-stranding XP-ellipsis. As we argue, X-stranding XP-ellipsis phenomena should exist in languages where XP-ellipsis and X-movement out of XP are both available (as is the case in V-stranding VP-ellipsis in Hebrew or Portuguese, see Goldberg 2005 and references cited there). This has the effect that if a language has XP-ellipsis but lacks X-stranding XP-ellipsis, X-movement out of XP must be lacking in the language. We show the application of this test in the nominal domain, for the particular case of Spanish, one of the languages for which N-raising out of the NP has been proposed in the literature (Bosque and Picallo 1996). Spanish indeed has productive instances of NP-ellipsis, but lacks N-stranding NP-ellipsis. Carefully ruling out other reasons for the lack of N-standing NP-ellipsis, the paper shows that it can only be due to the lack of N-movement out of NP.

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Notes

  1. The example (1) is adapted from Bosque and Picallo (1996), where a head movement analysis is proposed for deriving the final ordering of the DP. Here we abstract away from complexities in the ordering of adjectives in Romance and Germanic, also addressed in Bosque and Picallo, which are immaterial to our purposes.

  2. There is a controversy about the exact size of the elliptical gap in these constructions in Portuguese. Next to those arguing for VP-ellipsis here, there are accounts, such as Martins (1994) and Raposo (2000), that analyze (6) as involving head movement above T plus TP-ellipsis (or ellipsis of some higher functional category in the inflectional domain). We are aware of this variation and we do not want to settle the issue, as it is immaterial for our purposes. We opt for the VP-ellipsis analysis for Brazilian Portuguese adopted in Nunes and Zocca (2005) and Cyrino and Matos (2002, 2005), mainly because tense feature asymmetries between elliptical gap and antecedent are attested in this language, showing that the tense node is not affected by the identity condition on ellipsis. There are also proposals (cf. Cyrino and Matos 2005) which treat the difference between Brazilian and European Portuguese precisely as parametric variation with respect to the size of the elliptical gap.

  3. Consider for example the case of English, which has VP-ellipsis, but no V-stranding VP-ellipsis at least with main verbs (thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point). VP-ellipsis elides a vP category (Merchant 2013), where v refers to the category that determines the transitivity (v trans, v intrans), unergativity (v erg), or unaccusativity (v unacc) of the predicate. Arguments for vP deletion come from certain observations about identity: mismatches in the content of v are not licensed under ellipsis (ib), while mismatches in voice are allowed (ii).

    1. (i)
      figure k
    1. (ii)
      figure l

    Under the assumption that VP-ellipsis in English is vP-ellipsis, the ungrammaticality of (ib) is due to a violation of the identity condition on ellipsis (i.e., v transv intrans). Due to the same reasoning, VoiceP, the category selecting vP on the other hand is outside the ellipsis site, as voice mismatches in (ii) show.

    1. (iv)

      [TP [VoiceP Voice ]]   configuration of VP ellipsis in English

    For English then the correlation in (11) predicts that the language should lack head raising out of vP (to Voice or T) but allowing for the possibility that there is head movement internal to vP, dovetailing with proposals such as Pesetsky (1989) or Koizumi (1995), the latter providing most robust empirical evidence that English has V-to-AgrO-to-v movement. (v is termed upper V in Koizumi’s work, see Travis 1991 for a proposal that AgrO is an aspectual category, and López 2012 for a recent overview.)

    1. (v)

      [vP [ v [AgrO V+AgrO] v] [AGRoP t [VP t… ]]] [adapted from Koizumi 1995:102]

    On the plausible assumption that v in (v) refers to Merchant’s v that determines the predicate’s argument structure, head movement in (v) is internal to vP, the category which undergoes deletion in VP-ellipsis contexts. As this movement is restricted to the vP domain, it is fully compatible with (11). What would be incompatible with (11), at least in its present form, is head movement taking place to Voice or T. We are not aware of any evidence for postulating verb movement to Voice or T in English, however.

  4. The situation is the same in Portuguese. Just like in Spanish, examples of the following sort do not require an interpretation in which the elliptical noun phrase is construed as containing a modifier (João Costa p.c.):

    1. (i)
      figure w
    1. (ii)
      figure x

    This shows that while Portuguese has V-raising VP-ellipsis in the verbal domain, it lacks N-raising NP-ellipsis in the nominal domain, just as Spanish does.

  5. Ticio (2003) also adopts a double-layered structure for the θ-domain, where n conveys the thematic role associated to the external argument (when relevant) and N is in charge of internal thematic roles. Although related to a certain extent, this double layer should not be confused with the structure in (25), where the whole \(n+\sqrt{}\) seems to correspond to Ticio’s N head. As for the size of nominal ellipsis, Ticio considers that it only affects her NP domain and excludes her nP. This hypothesis does not confront with our main argument here, although see Saab (2009) for extensive discussion on the different predictions that such an assumption could have in connection with word ordering within DPs.

  6. As noticed in Sect. 2, we remain neutral as far as the component of the grammar where head movement applies and assume that it is syntactic mainly for expository reasons. However, it is evident that duplicating head movement across domains would lead us to different predictions both on the interpretative and the formal aspects of head movement. For instance, this approach would contradict the conclusion about V-stranding VP-ellipsis being PF-movement, rather than syntactic movement, drawn by Schoorlemmer and Temmerman (2012) on the basis of the so-called identity condition on V-stranding ellipsis. Even though the verb raises out of the VP in V-stranding VP-ellipsis, and thus is not part of the ellipsis site, it must always be lexically identical to its antecedent (see for details Goldberg 2005); in other words, it must be e-given (as defined in Merchant 2001). Schoorlemmer and Temmerman (2012) argue that this might follow from the fact that verbal head only raises in PF, that is, it is part of the ellipsis site at LF.

  7. More concretely, what the empirical evidence shows is that a morphological operation cannot affect an elliptical target. This is formulated by Saab and Lipták (to appear) in the following way:

    1. (i)

      Ellipsis-Morphology Generalization

      For every morphological operation MO that affects the domain of X, where X contains the target of MO, MO cannot apply in X if X is subject to ellipsis.

    The effect of this can be seen clearly in English VP-ellipsis where lowering from T to v is blocked. When the target of a given morphological operation is instead outside the elliptical gap, there is no bleeding effect under ellipsis. According to Saab (2009) gender agreement on determiners or other modifiers outside an elliptical NP is never blocked:

    1. (ii)
      figure am

    Assuming Concord as a morphological operation (Halle and Marantz 1993), this is correctly predicted by the generalization in (i). The same conclusion has to be reached by the proponents of phonological head movement in languages like Hebrew or Portuguese (see Footnote 5).

  8. Languages where we expect to find evidence for N-raising NP ellipsis include languages with long N-raising, exhibiting N-Dem-Num-Adj word order in the nominal domain (Greenberg 1963; Cinque 2005). For these languages the correlation in (11) is expected to show positive results in case they also exhibit NP ellipsis. Due to the rarity of these tongues (Kikuyu, Turkana, Noni, Nkore Kiga, Abu‘, Bai and Moro, according to Cinque 2005), we could not ascertain whether it is indeed the case that long N-movement languages show N-stranding ellipsis. We nevertheless thank an editor of NLLT for raising this point.

  9. Our speakers report that interpretation (i) is favoured if there is heavy stress on the indefinite:

    1. (i)

      It’s cold out there, yet you haven’t put on anything warm. Bill too hasn’t put on anything.

    Heavy stress in this case steers the parser towards a simple NP parse where the indefinite is understood to mean anything whatsoever or anything at all.

  10. Further indication that the restricted interpretation in (47a, b) is not due to pragmatic or semantic factors comes from the observation that languages differ with respect to the availability of this interpretation in indefinite noun phrases with postnominal modifiers. Spanish equivalents of (47) for example, do not allow for the relevant elliptical interpretation (see ib/iib):

    1. (i)
      figure aq
    1. (ii)
      figure ar

    If the restricted interpretation were licensed by pragmatic factors, it should be universally available across languages.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers and two editors of NLLT for their spot-on remarks on the present material, which allowed us to make our argument stronger. We also thank Jairo Nunes, Mercedes Pujalte, Pablo Zdrojewski for input on the topic discussed here. Finally, we are indebted to the following informants for their help with our search for N-raising NP ellipsis data in various languages: Diane Blakemore, João Costa, Edit Doron, David Embick, Diego Estomba, James Griffiths, William Harwood, Mary Kato, Allison Kirk, Marieke Meelen, Marta Ruda. All remaining errors are our own. The first author’s work was supported by NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research).

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Lipták, A., Saab, A. No N-raising out of NPs in Spanish: ellipsis as a diagnostic of head movement. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32, 1247–1271 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-014-9247-7

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