Silent Interactions: Spanish TP-Ellipsis and the Theory of Island Repair

Article

Summary *

This paper centers on the nature of Spanish TP-ellipsis (e.g., Juan fue al cine y María también Lit.: ?Juan went to the cinema and Mary also?), paying special attention to its behavior in contexts of long extraction of the remnant of the elliptical site. The long extraction data show that TP-ellipsis in Spanish behaves as Clitic Left Dislocation constructions, confirming thus previous claims in the literature. In particular, TP-ellipsis is sensitive to adjunct and relative islands. These facts lead us to the question of why other cases of TP-ellipsis, namely, Sluicing, can indeed repair islands. It is shown that an approach as the one in Merchant (2004) and (2008) is not able to derive this pattern. An alternative solution is proposed. Following the hypothesis that ellipsis and copy deletion form a natural class (cf. Chomsky 1993 and 1995), the presence or absence of island repair effect is derived as a matter of identity. Basically, a phrasal copy is elided under the same mechanism that applies in normal cases of ellipsis. A copy that is elided in a given syntactic cycle is not computed for the identity condition on ellipsis in a later cycle. However, if a copy cannot be elided in that given cycle it has to be computed for identity reasons at the ellipsis cycle. Under the assumption that indefinites and traces of wh-phrases are identical for the purposes of identity, it follows that ellipsis under WH-Sluicing can feed the elision of the wh-copies in the elliptical gap when there is an explicit indefinite in the correlate. This is never the case with Spanish TP-ellipsis because the copies of a left dislocated remnant never have an identical correlate in the antecedent. Information provided by the agent in SIGEVA