Contrastive focus and nominal ellipsis in Spanish

Abstract

In this paper formal accounts of nominal ellipsis are compared with information-structural approaches in the light of Spanish data. It is first shown that empty nominals in this language are not subject to formal conditions, such as proper government by a functional category and/or identification by strong agreement. It is then proposed that nominal ellipsis obeys a focus condition, whereby the remnant of ellipsis selects a relevant alternative or subset in a contextually given set of equivalent alternatives. This condition will allow us to explain, in particular, why certain determiners and kinds of adjectives are excluded in Spanish elliptical DPs. Finally, a technical implementation of this idea is offered combining feature assignment at the stage of lexical insertion with PF and LF interpretation of the features involved.