New hopes for a motivated verbal ellipsis parameter

SAAB, ANDRÉS

Seminario; You?re on mute: an online seminar on ellipsis; 2021

New York University

I will discuss the verbal ellipsis parameter in Romance and give a new formulation of the parameter, essentially motivated in the timing of head movement. As we will see, those Romance languages that lack verbal ellipsis in the relevant domains also lack syntactic head movement. More specifically, I contend that those languages make use of what I will call ?Generalized Restructuring? in Rizzi?s sense. That is to say, T and V are morphological combined in the same way certain modals are combined with infinitival heads. In addition to bring new light on the verbal ellipsis parameter, the theory predicts some nice correlations that are indeed attested. For instance, we will see that Spanish has, indeed, modal ellipsis, but only in absence of restructuring.