Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Identity Conditions on Ellipsis(2021) Ranero Echeverría, Rodrigo; Polinsky, Maria; Preminger, Omer; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents a new perspective on the identity condition underpinning ellipsis in natural language. It argues that the condition is irreducibly syntactic—at least in part—but the way this syntactic component works is different than previously thought. First, instead of simple identity of structures/features, the condition relies on non-distinctness. For example, a privative feature present in the antecedent but not in the ellipsis site (or vice-versa) does not constitute a violation of identity. Nor does a functional projection present in one but not the other. Second, the identity condition includes a component that pertains to √ROOTs. Unlike the component requiring featural non-distinctness, √ROOTs in the ellipsis site and the antecedent must be strictly identical. After providing an overview of the core research questions surrounding ellipsis, the dissertation builds its initial case in chapter 2 on the basis of novel data from Kaqchikel (Mayan). In contrast to the pattern familiar from languages like English, Kaqchikel bans certain voice mismatches under sluicing, but allows others. To account for that, I argue that clauses in the Agent Focus voice—which can mismatch with active and passive clauses—lack the VoiceP layer. The proposed identity condition which relies on non-distinctness captures this newly-established pattern. The empirical scope is expanded in chapter 3, where I consider mismatches above VoiceP in several languages. I show that the proposed identity condition can account for the observed generalizations regarding tense, polarity, illocution, and modality mismatches, which remain unexplained under other proposals. Chapter 4 zooms into the nominal domain and discusses mismatches in grammatical gender under nominal ellipsis in argument and predicate positions. I present cross-linguistically recurrent patterns of well-formed and ill-formed mismatches and argue that the proposed identity condition (coupled with the independently motivated mechanism of repair-by-ellipsis of morphophonological gaps) is necessary and sufficient to account for the attested patterns. I also argue that certain configurations satisfy the identity condition but are ill-formed for other reasons; in particular, ellipsis cannot repair encyclopedic gaps. Extensions of the proposal are discussed in chapter 5, including voice mismatches under sluicing in Austronesian languages, Chung’s generalization, and vehicle change phenomena.Item Island repair and non-repair by PF strategies(2009) Nakao, Chizuru; Hornstein, Norbert R; Lasnik, Howard; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since Ross (1967), it has been observed that there are configurations from which otherwise unbounded movement operations cannot occur, and they are called islands. Ellipsis and resumption are known to have a peculiar property to `repair' island violations. Each chapter of this thesis discusses a case of ellipsis/resumption to examine in what cases movement out of an island becomes licit by those strategies. Chapter 2 discusses the elliptical construction called sluicing, and argues for the PF-deletion analysis of sluicing (Merchant 2001, originated from Ross 1969). I will show that ECP violations made by adjunct sluicing cannot be repaired by sluicing, unlike island violations. I will thus argue that island violations are PF-violations while ECP violations are LF violations, and that PF-deletion ameliorates only PF-deletion. Chapter 3 examines properties of stripping and argues that stripping is derived by focus movement followed by PF-deletion. I try to attribute the lack of island repair under ellipsis in stripping to the fact that focus movement is not usually overt in English. Covert movement is derived by a weak feature (Chomsky 1995), but when a focused material is included in the PF-deletion site, it undergoes last resort PF-movement to satisfy the recoverability of deletion. I claim that this PF-movement is incompatible with island-repair, speculating that island violations are ameliorated at spell-out, and post-spell-out movement is `too late' to be repaired. Chapter 4 reviews properties of Japanese sluicing, and introduces Hiraiwa and Ishihara's (2002) analysis where Japanese sluicing is derived from what they call "no da" in-situ focus construction. Under this analysis, the sluiced wh-phrase undergoes focus movement, followed by clausal deletion. I adopt the analysis of stripping to Japanese sluicing, claiming that this is another instance of the last resort focus movement at PF, which cannot ameliorate island violations. Chapter 5 discusses properties of Left Node Raising (LNR) in Japanese. Based on the fact that simple LNR shows properties distinct from Null Object Construction (NOC), I claim that LNR involves ATB-movement rather than NOC. However, the second gap of LNR behaves like a pronoun only when included inside an island. I claim that this is an instance of null resumptive pronoun.