Investigations on salvation and non-salvation by deletion

Abstract

I use salvation and non-salvation by deletion as a window to understand computational and lexical resources in natural languages. I revisit previous findings from the literature and present novel data of repair under ellipsis from Polish and Nupe. Salvation by deletion is then used to analyze verb-echo answers in Brazilian Portuguese, which, I show, require a word order that is not available in the language. The phenomenon is also used to compare two types of approaches to phasal domains with date from Nupe. I show that salvation by deletion does not obtain in cases of intervention in A-movement and head movement locality, which implies that these are derivational constraints. Finally, salvation and nonsalvation by deletion are used as a way to distinguish two types of lexical gaps with data from Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and English.