VP and TP ellipsis: sentential polarity and information structure

• Autores: Ana Maria Martins
• Localización: Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance / coord. por Susann Fischer, Christoph Gabriel, 2016, ISBN 9783110311785, págs. 457-485
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
• Resumen

  • This paper focuses on two types of predicate ellipsis, namely Verbal Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), also known in the literature as verb-stranding ellipsis, and Tense Phrase Ellipsis (TPE), also called stripping or polarity ellipsis. It suggests that the polarity-encoding functional category Σ P is involved in the licensing of both types of predicate ellipsis, but only VPE requires that the verb be morphosyntactically associated with the Σ -head. The more restrictive licensing conditions imposed on VPE, relative to TPE, explain its more restricted distribution across languages. At the same time, it allows us to account for the correlation between the availability of VPE and a particular type of (typologically rarer) answering system in which the bare verb constitutes the unmarked pattern of minimal polar a ffi rmative answer. The paper then concentrates on comparing VP and TP ellipsis in one of the few Romance languages where both types of predicate ellipsis are allowed, viz. European Portuguese, and describes their di ff erent articulation with discourse and information structure. The fact that VPE and TPE might not be in free variation in European Portuguese is shown to be a consequence of the di ff erent information structure of the elliptical clause in each type of ellipsis. VPE is an instance of single focus (which can be assigned to di ff erent constituents) and is subject to a parallelism constraint on contrastive topic structures (Kertz 2013); TPE features double focus, on the polarity word and on the constituent preceding it.