Non‐sentential vs. Ellipsis Approaches: Review and Extensions

Abstract

AbstractNon‐sententials (also known as fragments, elliptical structures) can be roughly characterized as free‐standing utterances, which are, or at least appear to be, smaller than a sentence. The persisting controversy regarding non‐sententials is the following: are they pretty much what you see, base‐generated words, phrases, or small clauses (non‐sentential analysis), or are they full finite sentences that have undergone deletion/ellipsis (sentential/ellipsis analysis). This issue is all the more important today given that various interdisciplinary enterprises hinge on how it is resolved, including studies of language acquisition, language disorders, language evolution, and language representation in the brain. This review focuses on the most recent wave of controversy pertaining to non‐sententials and provides a critical assessment of the crucial connectivity/anti‐connectivity arguments, which are the backbone of both approaches, including islandhood, case, preposition stranding, and complementizer effects. The conclusion of this review is that a careful reexamination of each of these (anti‐)connectivity phenomena demonstrates that the non‐sentential approach is at least as successful as the ellipsis approach in accommodating these effects. Moreover, the non‐sentential approach opens up new and exciting prospects for enriching syntactic theory with new data and perspectives, as well as provides a better framework for interdisciplinary extensions mentioned above.