Against Evacuation Movement in NP-Ellipsis
Johanna Benz, Gesoel Mendes, Martin Salzmann
August 2024 

In this paper, we provide evidence from NP-ellipsis and its remnants against the popular mechanism of evacuation movement, arguing that the mechanism wrongly predicts freezing effects for subextraction from PP-remnants in English, as well as being incompatible with genitive remnants of NP-ellipsis in German, which cannot undergo the movement required to escape ellipsis. We argue for an alternative analysis following a separate research tradition, according to which constituents can survive ellipsis without evacuation movement when they are focused. Modeling ellipsis as an instruction to forgo vocabulary and assuming that this procedure is blocked in focus environments reconciles the availability of certain types of ellipsis remnants with their inability to undergo evacuation movement.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007562 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the 47th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference; University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 30.1, 21–30. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/59868
keywords:	ellipsis, np-ellipsis, evacuation movement, freezing effects, genitive, german, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [September 2023]
Downloaded:	1300 times

 

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