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Derivational argument ellipsis

  • Daiko Takahashi EMAIL logo
From the journal The Linguistic Review

Abstract

The present article is concerned with two important observations about argument ellipsis. One is that it may apply to arguments that do not enter into agreement relationship with functional categories but not to those that do; the other is that extraction out of elided arguments is possible in Japanese. In order to account for these properties, I adopt the theory of derivational ellipsis, according to which elliptic constituents are marked as such as early as in the syntactic component, and the hypothesis that v, V, and an internal argument can be combined in different ways in different languages. The proposed analysis does not only account for the relevant facts about argument ellipsis in Japanese, but also extends to other languages that exhibit slightly different behaviors with regard to null arguments.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mamoru Saito and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The research leading to this article was conducted as part of the collaborative research project “Generative Perspectives on the Syntax and Acquisition of Japanese” at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, and was presented at various stages of development at the Syntax and Language Acquisition workshops at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in December, 2013 and in December, 2016; at a colloquium at Kwansei Gakuin University in March, 2015; and at the 1st International Workshop on Basque-Japanese and Neighboring Languages held at the University of the Basque Country in December, 2015. I am grateful to the participants in those meetings for their stimulating questions and helpful comments. Needless to say, all the remaining inadequacies are my own.

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Published Online: 2019-07-06
Published in Print: 2020-02-25

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