On Certain Adjacency Effects in Ellipsis Contexts

Abstract

In this article, I show that crosslinguistically, there is a recurring pattern in various ellipsis constructions (e.g., fragment answers, right-dislocation, right-node raising, VP-ellipsis), to the effect that parts of a remnant can be additionally deleted under adjacency to a deletion site, often ignoring constituency. I argue that the phenomenon in question follows from the fact that PF deletion, being an operation in the component determining linear order, targets linearized strings, similarly to the fact that movement, being an operation in the component determining hierarchical relations, targets constituents.