1 Polarity in Russian and Typology of Predicate Ellipsis
Some typological and theoretical consequences
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5. Some typological and theoretical consequences Given the observations in the previous sections, one cannot claim that VP-ellipsis is restricted to languages where the SP is below the TP: in Russian the SP arguably is above the TP, but nevertheless VP-ellipsis is possible. This proves false the idea that VP-ellipsis is uniformly licensed by the focussed S, in the structure schematically represented in (108): (108) SP
pro PRED
I have argued that Russian suggests the existence of an alternative possibility of licensing VP-ellipsis, shown in (109): (109) TP
pro PRED
Aux The exact mechanism of licensing pro PRED
in (109) was not discussed in the present paper. It was just noted that the configuration represented in (109) reproduces the one Lobeck (1995) has proposed for VP-ellipsis, where pro PRED strong agreement with the licensing head, defined in some special way. Whether Lobeck’s account is applicable for Russian or not, the data discussed in the previous section shows that (109) does not represent the only possibility of licensing VP- ellipsis in human language. At the same time, comparison of conditions on predicate ellipsis in Russian and in English shows that polarity nevertheless does play a special role in licensing predicate ellipsis: whenever a polarity marker is focussed in an elliptic construction, the elided site must be exactly the complement of that marker. In English, VP is 39 always immediately subjacent to the projection headed by focussed polarity ( SP). In Russian, whenever polarity is focussed, the elided site should be the TP, which is the complement of the SP, rather than the VP. The analysis of Russian predicate ellipsis which I have suggested here, if correct, also has another interesting implication: it proves untenable uniform treatment of ellipsis retaining polarity markers as VP-ellipsis. An example of such approach is found in Lopez (1995), who treats the Spanish analogue of da/net-constructions, retaining the polarity marker si ‘yes’ or no ‘no,’ but always deleting the auxiliary, as an instance of VP-ellipsis. According to Lopez, the deletion site in these constructions is the same as in English VP-ellipsis: it is the complement of S. The proposed difference between English and Spanish is that in English the auxiliary is head- adjoined to S (and actually moves further on to AgrS, as Lopez argues), but for the auxiliary in Spanish this adjunction is impossible, to the effect that the auxiliary stays below S. Although I do not attempt to argue against Lopez’s analysis of Spanish, I believe that the data discussed above clearly show that it is not applicable to Russian. First, we have seen that the auxiliary in Russian actually can be adjoined to S, as shown by the tree diagram in (96), and in order to treat da/net-constructions as instances of VP-ellipsis we will need to explain why in their particular case this adjunction does not take place. Second, viewing the same deletion site in da/net- constructions and VP-ellipsis constructions in Russian will fail to explain why the latter, but not the former allows the subject and other VP-external elements to be backgrounded and presentationally focussed. In contrast, under my analysis, which views different deletion sites in the two constructions, this difference falls out for free: in VP-ellipsis these elements may stay in situ, where they are either backgrounded or presentationally focussed, but in da/net-constructions, in order to be retained, they have to be extracted into the position designated for contrastive topics. What the conclusions made in the present paper do not allow us to do, however, is to see what predicts whether in a given language an auxiliary is deleted or retained in predicate ellipsis constructions expressing polarity. But whatever explanations to this distribution are proposed in the future, they have to allow coexistence of the two options in a language. 6. Conclusion In this paper, I have studied predicate ellipsis accompanied by overt expressing of polarity in Russian, comparing it systematically with English and sporadically with some other languages. I have attempted to argue that the Russian data proves false the assumption shared by a number of today’s approaches to predicate ellipsis, namely that (1) any given language can have either predicate ellipsis which retains an auxiliary together with a polarity marker, or predicate ellipsis which deletes an auxiliary when a polarity marker is retained, but not the two types of predicate ellipsis simultaneously, and (2) both types of predicate ellipsis are possible only when a polarity marker is focussed. Russian demonstrates two types of predicate ellipsis with expressed polarity, one retaining, the other one not retaining the auxiliary. The theory of predicate ellipsis therefore probably should be less restrictive than it is assumed. Analyzing predicate ellipsis in Russian, we have also encountered some evidence in favor of existence of two polarity projections taking different positions in the functional skeleton of Russian sentence. The putative differences between these
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