Two routes to predicate ellipsis in Spanish. The clitic versus focus strategy
Alejo Alcaraz
June 2025 

This paper documents and analyzes a predicate ellipsis alternation found in contemporary Spanish, addressing some challenges it poses for current theories of ellipsis licensing with the Minimalist Program. Spanish predicate ellipsis occurs in two variants: (i) lo-insertion, where an overt proform (the neuter clitic lo) attaches to the auxiliary preceding the silent gap, and (ii) lo-omission, where predicate ellipsis is licensed under polarity focus (typically marked on the stranded auxiliary). Both variants arise from ellipsis of the main predicate—and its arguments— and are licensed by the same restricted class of auxiliaries. To account for their shared distribution, this paper argues that predicate ellipsis stems from a single [E]-feature, in both the lo-insertion and the lo-omission context. Concretely, the presence of a clitic (in lo-insertion) and its absence under polarity focus (in lo-omission) are analyzed as two alternative strategies to satisfy the semantic requirements of a single [E]-feature, without encoding these contexts for ellipsis directly in [E]’s syntax. This analysis is further extended to predicate ellipsis constructions in Germanic languages, which employ strategies for predicate anaphora akin to both lo-insertion and lo-omission, albeit with a different distribution.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/009034 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Accepted. Linguistic Review (pre-publication version)
keywords:	ellipsis, vp ellipsis, vp anaphora, clitics, neuter clitic, spanish, polarity focus, ellipsis alternation, predicate ellipsis, tough movement, focus fronting, extraction out of ellipsis, auxiliary stranding vp ellipsis, pronominalization, surface vs deep anaphora, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v3 [May 2025] v2 [May 2025] v1 [May 2025]
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