Abstract
Argument Ellipsis (AE) is a productive process in Hebrew, but some arguments resist ellipsis—precisely those that do not denote individuals. This constraint, a reflection of a general constraint on variables in natural language, is captured if AE sites are descended from a pro element that is derivationally replaced by a constituent recoverable from the antecedent. This must occur after spellout (to escape pronunciation) but prior to LF (to allow overt subextraction). The proposed analysis integrates novel data as well as recent findings from studies of AE in East Asian languages, and offers a new derivational path to ellipsis, which invokes neither PF-deletion nor LF-copying.
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Notes
In Landau (2018), my main concern was to vindicate the AE analysis over its competitors—pro-drop, Ā-variable and V-stranding VP ellipsis (VSVPE). Most of the data cited in this section is neutral between AE and VSVPE, as it is not my purpose to reproduce the earlier arguments against VSVPE here. Nonetheless, Sect. 5 returns to this debate with a new set of contrasts.
In Sect. 6.2 I return to AE of clausal complements.
See Park 1997; Oku 1998; Kim 1999; Takahashi 2006, 2008, 2013, 2014; Saito 2007, 2017; Aoun and Li 2008; Abe 2009; Cheng 2013; Simpson et al. 2013; Duguine 2014; Lee 2014; Sato 2014, 2015, 2016; Cyrino and Lopes 2016; Sato and Karimi 2016; Bailyn 2017; Rasekhi 2018; Sato 2019; Han et al. 2020; Sakamoto 2020; Soltan 2020.
The proposal, of course, assumes that Japanese and similar radical pro-drop languages do not employ null determiners; thus, property-meanings can be converted to individual-meanings only post-syntactically.
In support of this analogy, Saito (2007, 2017) notes that AE and pro similarly extend to the same kind of PPs—locative and temporal PPs but not manner and reason PPs. However, if absence of syntactic checking of uninterpretable features were sufficient to license AE (= LF-copying), PPs and CPs—which do not check Case—would be eligible to ellipsis in English-type languages, contrary to fact (see Cheng 2013: 190).
Landman (2006: 98) only briefly discusses predicative so (e.g., I thought she would be happy, but she certainly doesn’t seem so), suggesting a parallel treatment, in analogy to that way. An alternative analysis for all predicative pro-forms would be to assume that they denote “nominalized properties” in Chierchia’s (1984, 1985) sense, that is, the individual correlates of properties.
I am oversimplifying Poole’s account. Poole proposes that traces must range over individuals (the Trace Interpretation Constraint, TIC) and argues (Poole 2017: 228) that this constraint cannot be subsumed under the NHTV because traces are converted to anaphoric definite descriptions that contain a variable (Fox 2003; Sauerland 2004). The TIC has the effect of ruling out both property-type traces and generalized-quantifier (GQ) type ones. GQ-traces (of type < <e,t>,t>) would allow semantic reconstruction (for scope) to dissociate from syntactic reconstruction (for binding); but previous work has established that the two go together (Romero 1998; Fox 1999). Nevertheless, Poole acknowledges that the NHTV and TIC should be unified at some deeper level. From the perspective of the present discussion, AE sites start out their derivational live hosting a pro-variable (Sect. 6), so it makes sense to keep to Landman’s framework and the NHTV.
Demonstrative pronouns are acceptable in antipronominal environments (e.g., Irene liked the name Snowflake, and she called the cat that/*it; Poole 2017: 31). Drawing on various syntactic and semantic considerations, Poole (2017: 217) argues that they are type-shifted to denote a property. Alternatively, demonstrative pronouns are phrasal modifiers (see Leu 2007 and the references therein), already interpreted as predicates. When used referentially (e.g., I saw that), they modify a null noun denoting THING.
There is some inter-speaker variation in the extent to which individual examples are judged acceptable, yet the set in (28)–(31) is overall clearly distinguishable from the set in (22)–(27), which is ungrammatical for all speakers. The attested variation in AE within decomposable idioms possibly reflects the fact that “decomposability” is a gradient scale, and different speakers may draw the line at different points along that scale.
Dative pronouns in Hebrew are necessarily human-denoting (Francez 2006), ruling out pronominalization of the idiom chunk in (26).
As to the difference between ellipsis and pronominalization of the idiom chunk, Sato claims it follows from the LF-copying analysis of AE: “The body part in the antecedent clause… cannot serve as a suitable target for LF-copy because it has already become an unanalyzable part of the whole atomic VP by the time when the elided part in the elliptical clause is to be filled by LF-copy” (Sato 2020: 272), but “a pronoun (overt or null) can be employed even when its antecedent is a part of a syntactically derived complex predicate at LF” (Sato 2020: 273). This seems like a description of a puzzle rather than a solution. What allows discourse anaphora to access an “unanalyzable part of the whole atomic VP”? Note that truly unanalyzable units create anaphoric islands (Postal 1969; Ward et al. 1991). On the present approach, no systematic discrepancy is expected between the accessibility of idiom chunks to pronouns and to silent constituents that replace pronouns.
For arguments that English so/thus are not pro-adverbs, but rather denote properties of realizations of event kinds, see Landman (2006: 83–92).
Hebrew middle morphology is sometimes syncretic with passive morphology, as in (47b). The second clause in the latter thus has an irrelevant (and absurd) passive reading without the adverb – short poems are not written.
An additional case in point involves frequency and duration adverbs in Chinese, which, according to the prevalent view, occupy a complement position in the VP (Huang 1982; Li 1990; Soh 1998). When co-occurring with an object, they trigger verb doubling. AE may then target the object but not the adverb, which is, in fact, obligatory (Li 2014: 55).
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(i)
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(i)
All the examples in (50)–(52) are from Adger (1994: 99–103), except (51b).
The preposition ke- ‘as’ does not take weak pronouns as complements so this test cannot be applied in (56). A strong demonstrative pronoun would be acceptable (ke-xaze ‘as such’).
The crucial difference, according to Landau (2020b), is whether the raised verb crosses a spellout domain (VP but not AuxP). When it does, its trace can no longer mediate the deletion instruction to PF.
Phrasal pro-forms may, of course, denote outside the domain of individuals, as their basic semantic type is shifted by functors they combine with (see fn. 10). Note that (70) predicts not only that AE sites cannot denote properties but also that they cannot denote generalized quantifiers, aligning with Poole’s (2017) constraint on trace denotations. This is indeed true, as I briefly demonstrate in Sect. 7, although the full case is laid out in Landau (to appear).
The present proposal associates pro-forms with reconstructed syntactic structure, but it does not imply that they cannot be associated with PF-deletion in other elliptical constructions. Indeed, certain varieties of VP ellipsis have been analyzed precisely in such terms: PF-deletion of a VP node that strands an overt pro-form (Baltin 2012 on do so anaphora in English; Hauser et al. 2007 and Bentzen et al. 2013 on gøre det/gjøre det ‘do it’ anaphora in Danish and Norwegian, respectively). The do so case is fundamentally different in that the pro-form so is not a surrogate of the surface anaphor at all; rather, its complement is the target of ellipsis. The Scandinavian constructions do involve what seems like a property-anaphor, det, in the complement position of the light verb, but this is an illusion. Throughout the derivation and up to LF, the VP is a full syntactic structure, and det is inserted only at PF. Thus, det is not a syntactic or semantic variable, and perforce is not subject to the Generalized NHTV. Finally, the predicate anaphor le in French displays clear properties of a surface anaphor, e.g., allowing subextraction (Sportiche 1995); Sportiche, in fact, takes it to be a propositional anaphor (subsuming both the elided predicate and the extracted subject). Either way, it does not fall under the NHTV.
(71b) can be viewed as a mirror-image of the early Pronominalization transformation of the 1960s: while the latter converted an NP into a pronoun under identity with antecedent NP, the former converts a pronoun into a DP under identity with an antecedent DP.
See Landau (2018: ex. 50) for Hebrew data on QR out of elided arguments and (a rare case of) overt subextraction out of an elided DP.
This view receives interesting support from Korean, where CP complements can undergo AE if and only if they are nominal (featuring a nominalizer and/or a case marker, the latter sometimes optional), a property that also underlies their susceptibility to pronominalization (Sohn 2012).
On a Late Insertion model, the difference between the two is the presence of spellout instructions at the terminal nodes of the syntactic object vs. their absence from the LF-object (see Saab 2022, for a recent implementation).
Chomsky further suggests that semantic interpretation is cyclically synchronized with phonological spellout, so that a single transfer operation feeds both interfaces at every phase level. I take issue with this assumption below.
In this respect the present proposal is also different from Fortin (2011), where Sluicing is analyzed as copying of the LF structure of an antecedent TP. Fortin assimilates this operation to sideward movement (Nunes 2004), a nontrivial step, since sideward movement requires access to a syntactic object embedded inside a bigger one; this powerful device is not needed on the present analysis. In addition, sideward movement is wedded to a complex algorithm responsible for PF-deletion of copies unrelated by c-command. Since the mechanism of “obtaining silence” in AE is fundamentally different from PF-deletion, I will not pursue this analogy here.
Can pro-replacement occur before transfer? If it can, the result would not be distinguishable from direct Merge of the argument, so the point is moot. A reviewer also asks whether EMAT can replace an overt pronoun. Theoretically, this should be possible; the replacement would only affect LF, keeping the overt pronoun at PF intact. This way of generating overt surface anaphors would be a mirror-image of overt surface anaphors generated at PF (see fn. 22). In fact, pronominal clitics in Catalan and Serbo-Croatian may well instantiate this option (Quer and Rosseló 2013; Runić 2014; Bošković 2018).
I return below to the question of what determines whether a language allows AE or not.
This raises the intriguing possibility that unconstrained EMAT may apply in inner speech, where RoE is not at issue, as the content of merged arguments, whether overt or not, is always recoverable to the speaker. It is well-known that inner speech has phonological structure (Langland-Hassan and Vicente 2018), which indicates that its constituents undergo transfer to PF (later aborted en route to the speech articulators). The often-made observation that it is more fragmentary and abridged than overt speech may be partially explained in terms of pervasive use of EMAT.
Parallelism domains are relevant to recoverability whenever the ellipsis site contains a variable bound from the outside (Takahashi and Fox 2005), whether a pronoun (77) or a trace (78). There are more recent reformulations of this concept, but the choice among them is not relevant for the present concerns.
Giannakidou and Merchant’s (1997) explanation is syntactic, though, unlike the present semantic explanation. They assume that strong quantifiers reside in D whereas weak ones attach below it. Because D is the head-licensor of nominal ellipsis, it cannot be included in the ellipsis site. Notice that this account cannot generalize to languages where AE applies to definite (hence, full DP) arguments, which nonetheless display a parallel ban on ellipsis of strong quantifiers. Below I sugggest that head-licensing is anyway operative in PF-deletion only, so it does not constrain AE (which is derived by EMAT).
See Ahn and Cho (2011) for a parallel observation in Korean.
See Tomioka (2014: 257) for the original observation in Japanese.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this study have been presented at the linguistics colloquia of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Geneva, the “You’re on Mute!” ellipsis seminar organized by Gary Thoms at NYU and GLOW 45 at Queen Mary University of London. I am grateful to the audiences in all these venues for their helpful feedback, as well as to two anonymous NLLT reviewers. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 495/20).
Funding
Israel Science Foundation Grant number 495/20.
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Landau, I. Argument ellipsis as external merge after transfer. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 41, 793–845 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-022-09552-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-022-09552-3