earticle

영어

The main conditions that have to be fulfilled in elliptical sentences are recoverability and licensing. One way of implementing this recoverability condition is with the notion of e-GIVENESS used in Merchant (2001). This recoverability relation between the ellipsis site and the antecedent is a semantic identity condition. It has been proposed, however, that the ellipsis site and the antecedent have to be syntactically identical as well. There has been some debate on the relation between the antecedent and the ellipsis and on whether ellipsis requires strict syntactic identity or not. However, this paper aims to re-examine the structural isomorphism and exploit the syntactic identity condition to license ellipsis phenomena especially in sluicing. This paper also shows that, once the PF-deletion approach is adopted, the syntactic/derivational constraints involved in the definition of the ellipsis domain and the characterization of the licensor can be elegantly stated in phasal terms. That is, the domain of ellipsis coincides with the complement of a phase head that is deleted at PF and only phase heads can license the PF-deletion of their complement.