On an undocumented type of predicate ellipsis in Spanish and its consequences for the theory of ellipsis licensing

Andrés Saab ^[1] ^[3] ; Laura Stigliano ^[2]
1. [1] Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
  
  Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
  
  Argentina
2. [2] Ohio State University
  
  Ohio State University
  
  City of Columbus, Estados Unidos
3. [3] Universidad de Buenos Aires
  
  Universidad de Buenos Aires
  
  Argentina
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Localización: Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, ISSN-e 2385-4138, Vol. 9, Vol. 4, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Trending topics in Romance linguistics)
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- In this paper, we introduce and discuss a type of ellipsis in Spanish, undocumented in the previous literature, which we will refer to as Predicate Phrase Ellipsis (PredP-Ellipsis), and its consequences for the theory of ellipsis licensing. PredP-Ellipsis is a type of ellipsis in which the complement of a copular verb undergoes deletion, whenever there is contrastive focus (typically encoded in Polarity) involved in the sentence. We provide an account for why this type of ellipsis is allowed in a language that lacks lower ellipses in the verbal domain (such as vP-Ellipsis), and implement our proposal by introducing an [E]-feature which is typically licensed when it enters into an Agree relation with a Polarity head higher in the structure.