“Nominal Ellipsis and Morphological Structure in Spanish”

KORNFELD, LAURA & ANDRÉS SAAB

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2002

John Benjamins

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2004; p. 183 - 198

In this paper we intend to account for nominal ellipsis in Spanish, a language in which this phenomenon is far more productive than in other Romance languages, as French or Italian. We present here a new set of data that poses difficulties to previous analysis and supports the general framework of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle & Marantz 1993). We show that nominal ellipsis is strongly constrained by operations and properties of Morphological Structure (MS), such as morphological identity, concord of morphosyntactic features, late insertion, adjacency and competition. Consequently, we propose that nominal ellipsis is actually the superficial result of non-insertion of phonological features in MS. The standard examples of Spanish nominal ellipsis are in (1) (from Brucart 1987): (1) a. Mi cuñado utiliza el coche antiguo para ir a trabajar y el nuevo para trasladarse los fines de semana a su casa de campo (lit. ‘My brother-in-law uses the old car for working and the new for going to his country-house on the week-ends’) b. El hijo de Luis y el de Antonio se han hecho muy amigos (lit. ‘The son of Luis and the of Antonio have become good friends’). c. La casa que visitaste ayer y la que has visto esta mañana pertenecieron a un mismo dueño (lit. ‘The house that you visited yesterday and the that you have seen this morning belong to the same person’). One of the peculiarities of this phenomenon is the fact that the antecedent and the deleted noun may differ in number (2.a and c), but not in gender (2.b). (2) a. Juan visitó a sus tíos y Pedro al tío suyo / al tío de él (lit. ‘Juan visited his uncles and Pedro the(sg.) his / the(sg.) of his’). b. * Juan visitó a su tío y María visitó a la tía suya / a la tía de ella (lit. ‘Juan visited his uncle and María the(fem.) hers / the(fem.) of her’)  (Depiante & Masullo 2001) c. Juan visitó a su tío y Pedro a los tíos suyos / a los tíos de él (lit. ‘Juan visited his(sg.) uncle and Pedro the(pl.) his / the(pl.) of his’). Based on (2.a), Depiante & Masullo (2001) suggest that nouns enter the numeration inflected for gender, but not for number (in a parallel way to the distinction between main and auxiliary verbs in English proposed by Lasnik 1995). This analysis seems to account for the contrast between (2.a) and (2.b). Since number (but not gender) is an independent functional head in the syntax, there would be strict identity between the antecedent and the deleted noun in the moment of the elision. However, Depiante & Masullo’s analysis does not explain how the plural morpheme gets deleted in (2.c), where the antecedent is singular. In fact, a similar problem would appear in all proposals adopting PF deletion, which requires strict identity. This problem can be solved straightforwardly if we adopt some assumptions of Distributed Morphology, such as the existence of a post Spell-Out Morphological Structure (MS), where agreement/concord and vocabulary insertion take place. We propose that nominal elision in Spanish is a phenomenon that occurs precisely in MS. This means that, under certain conditions (i.e., strict identity of lexical and formal features), phonological features have the possibility of not undergoing insertion in the terminal nodes. Thus, after concord, sentence (2.c) would be something like (3) in MS (recall that, at this moment, items are really terminal nodes without phonological features): (3) Juan visitó a su tío y Pedro a los   tío s suyo s / de él.   Because of the strict identity between tío and the lexical antecedent and between –s and the determiner plural feature, the phonological features of tío and –s are allowed to not undergo insertion; therefore, these items become invisible to the phonology. This analysis rules out examples (not mentioned in previous accounts) such as (4). In the case of elision of bare nouns, the antecedent must be plural, because, if not, the plural marker of the noun can not be deleted (cf. with 2.c): (4) Juan vio el/ un pájaro amarillo a la tarde; después, Pedro vio ?*(los/ unos/ algunos/ varios) rojos (lit. ‘Juan saw a yellow bird in the evening; later, Pedro saw ?*(the/ ones/ some/several) red(pl.)’). The last set of data we try to explain is the paradigm in (5), which contrasts with examples such as (1.b), where the ellided noun precedes a PP headed by de: (5) a. *El tren a Barcelona y el e a Madrid han salido con retraso (lit. ‘The train to Barcelona and the to Madrid have departed late’). b. *Me gusta el agua con gas y la e sin gas (lit. ‘I like the water with gas and the without gas’) (Brucart 1987) We particularly discuss Raposo’s (1999) proposal that the preposition de has peculiar properties that differ from other Spanish prepositions, i.e., de belongs to the same phase (cf. Chomsky 1998) as determiners and nouns. Since el is a clitic, it can only adjoin to an element in its own phase. We agree with Raposo’s idea of considering this a phonological problem, but we found counter-examples (such as 6.a) for his specific technical implementation: (6) a. El chico que me señalaste y el del que te hablé son amigos (lit. ‘The boy that you showed me and the of the that I talked to you are friends’) b. Esos son los alumnos que miraste antes y esos son (*los) a los que les diste un chocolate (lit. ‘These are the students that you have looked before and these are (*the) to the(pl.) that you give a chocolate’). In (6.a), de is not in the same phase as the determiner, because the relative clause including the preposition constitutes an independent phase. These data allow us to conclude that an explanation in terms of phases is not satisfactory, since it undergenerates. The contrasts in (5) and (6) would be best accounted for by means of the notion of adjacency, along the lines of DM, Bobaljik (1994) and others, since N gapping requires adjacency between el and an adjective, de or que, independently of the structure. These facts support the idea that linear order (and not only the hierarchical structure) is relevant for MS. In conclusion, the data about nominal ellipsis in Spanish provide strong evidence in favor of DM. Furthermore, the DM notion of competition permits to explain the well-known differences in the properties of N gapping among Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan). The whole picture shows that an account that reduces crosslinguistic variation to properties of MS is more appealing than previous analysis of nominal ellipsis.   References Bobaljik, J. (1994) What does adjacency do? In: Harley, H. & C. Phillips (eds.) The Morphology-Syntax Connection. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 22, 1-32. Brucart, J. M. (1987) La elisión sintáctica en español. Barcelona: Bellaterra. Chomsky, N. (1998) Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework. In: MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics, number 15, 1-56. Depiante, M. & P. Masullo (2001) Género y número en la elipsis nominal: consecuencias para la hipótesis lexicalista. Paper presented at I Encuentro de Gramática Generativa, Gral. Roca, 22-24 november 2001. Halle, M. & A. Marantz (1993) Distributed Morphology and the Pieces of Inflection. In: Hale, K. & S.Keyser (eds.) The View from Building 20. Cambridge: MIT Press, 111-176. Lasnik, H. (1995) Verbal Morphology: Syntactic Structures meets the Minimalist Program. In: Lasnik, H. (1999) Minimalist Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell, chapter 5. Raposo, E. (1999) Towards a Minimalist Account of Nominal Anaphora in Spanish and English, ms., UCSB.