Nominal Ellipsis

Abstract

Chapter 5 examines the properties of nominal elision in Spanish and their relation to other elements within the nominal expression, to classify the phenomenon and to be able to provide an analysis that extends the empirical coverage of the current analysis of nominal expressions in Spanish. In doing so, some of the fundamental open questions regarding ellipsis in natural languages, such as the nature of the omitted elements in ellipsis data and the type of gap created by the ellipsis process in the nominal expressions, will be addressed. This chapter provides strong evidence for the hypothesis that argues for having syntactic structure in the ellipsis site and concludes that nominal ellipsis is XP ellipsis (i.e., ellipsis of maximal categories).

The proposal in this chapter is that Spanish NP elision is a PF deletion phenomenon, which is applied after some stylistic PF operations. In particular, I maintain that elements generated within NP may move outside of the NP prior to the application in PF of the ellipsis operation. I also argue that in addition to NP ellipsis, Spanish has a surface anaphora that should be treated in terms of LF copying. Finally, to account for the restrictions of nominal ellipsis in definite DPs, I follow previous analyses, such as Brucart and Gràcia (1986) and Raposo (1999) and assume that there is a syntactic constraint involved in these cases, which implies the boundaries of phases.