Argument Ellipsis, Anti-agreement, and Scrambling

要旨

This chapter considers the phenomenon of argument ellipsis in a comparative syntactic perspective. Although a number of languages in the world allow subjects and/or objects to be null, not every null-argument language permits them to be elliptic. It has been observed in the literature that some null arguments, such as empty subjects and objects in Japanese, can be elliptic; others, such as empty subjects in Spanish, cannot, and they are unambiguously pronominal. To resolve the question regarding what property of the relevant languages correlates with the (im)possibility of argument ellipsis, the chapter examines the two hypotheses that have been put forth in the literature, one correlating argument ellipsis to scrambling and the other to the lack of agreement, and claims on the basis of data drawn from Turkish and Chinese that the latter approach is superior.

主題