Abstract
Two strategies of NP-ellipsis have been identified in the literature: (a) the elision strategy, and (b) the pronominalization strategy. The former has been said to be dependent on the presence of inflectional morphology (i.e., agreement) on the adjectival remnant. The latter strategy is used when the adjectival remnant does not carry any inflectional morphology. The aim of this article is to show that there are languages, among which Dutch, where morphological agreement appears to be the licensing factor, but where one-insertion (i.e., the pronominalization strategy) is the actual strategy. We arrive at this conclusion via an in-depth and systematic micro-comparative investigation of NPE in a number of closely related languages and dialects, more specifically: Afrikaans, Frisian, (standard) Dutch and dialectal variants of Dutch. English will be included in our analysis as well, since it is a core example of the pronominalization (i.e., one insertion) strategy. At a more theoretical level, it will be shown on the basis of close inspection of our micro-variation data that the pro-nouns involved in the pronominalization strategy have a composite structure. It will be shown that this decompositional analysis of pro-nouns brings together (i.e., unifies) the elision strategy and the pronominalization strategy. Another outcome of our study will be that languages/dialects may have available more than one NPE strategy.
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The research reported on in this article is part of a larger research project entitled Diversity in Dutch DP Design (DiDDD), which is financially supported by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). We are also grateful to the consultants of the DiDDD-project for providing us with the relevant data of their Dutch dialect. We would further like to thank our consultants for Afrikaans and Frisian for their help with and discussion of the data from their languages. For Afrikaans: Theresa Biberauer, Frenette Southwood and Johan Oosthuizen. For Frisian: Siebren Dyk, Eric Hoekstra, Jarich Hoekstra, Bouke Slofstra, Janneke Spoelstra, Willem Visser. We are also grateful to the three NLLT reviewers for their very useful comments. The content of this article was presented at a 2008 UCLA-minicourse entitled ‘The study of syntactic microvariation: perspectives and tools’, which was sponsored by a joint collaborative grant from the Universities of California and the University of Utrecht. We would like to thank the audience, and especially Hilda Koopman and Ed Stabler, for very useful discussion.
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Corver, N., van Koppen, M. NP-ellipsis with adjectival remnants: a micro-comparative perspective. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 29, 371–421 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9140-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9140-6