Sound-form non-insertion and the direction of ellipsis

Abstract

The paper investigates cases of coordinate ellipsis in Hungarian, fromthe perspective of possible differences between forward and backward ellipsis,and argues that all instances of backward ellipsis (BWE), as well as mosttypes of forward ellipsis (FWE), arise by the non-insertion of phonologicalshapes to the terminal nodes of syntactic phrase markers at the level of morphology,where vocabulary insertion takes place in a standard version of late insertiontheories: Distributed Morphology. It is shown, on the one hand, that evenin those cases of FWE where considerable lexical differences occur betweenthe ellipsis site and its parallel licensing antecedent, the device of non-insertionis often sucifient for a satisfactory account, thereby limiting the scopeof applying other, less easily constrained devices, such as anaphora interpretation,or reconstruction. On the other hand, BWE need not be analysed as the resultof a separate operation (PF deletion), either, as non-insertion has the sameeffects, and may bear the same restrictions.