Antecedent-contained clausal argument ellipsis

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to argue for a particular analysis of null clausal arguments in terms of ellipsis. It is first illustrated that null clausal arguments have underlying syntactic structures that are subject to ellipsis. The main and novel observation for this claim is that null clausal arguments exhibit the effect of the parallelism constraint that other ellipsis constructions like verb phrase ellipsis are also subject to, along the line of Takahashi (Proceedings of FAJL 6: formal approaches to Japanese linguistics, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Cambridge, pp 203–213, 2013). It then examines a hitherto unexplored construction, called antecedent-contained clausal argument ellipsis, where a null clausal argument appears to be properly contained by its antecedent. Although the construction can be readily accommodated by assuming the ellipsis process that directly elides arguments (argument ellipsis), it raises serious difficulties for its alternative analysis that employs the ellipsis process targeting a VP whose head has evacuated it (verb-stranding VP-ellipsis). This paper thus provides a novel case where the argument ellipsis analysis is required, no matter how well the verb-stranding VP-ellipsis analysis accommodates other null argument phenomena.