In ellipsis, a grammatical position that is left unpronounced is interpreted as parallel to a linguistic antecedent. Classic work (Hankamer and Sag 1976, Depiante 2001) has shown that natural languages employ at least two strategies of retrieving missing material: In one (deep anaphora), there is either no syntactic material or at most there is a null pronoun in the structure, and the interpretation largely relies on the pragmatic context. A second strategy (surface anaphora, or just ellipsis) involves silent syntactic structure that is interpreted under identity with a linguistic antecedent. In this course, we will focus on the latter type (Lasnik and Funakoshi 2018) and specifically on how silence comes about and on how identity is to be understood.
Empirically, we will investigate crosslinguistic data from a range of elliptical constructions: VP-ellipsis (Van Craenenbroeck 2014), Sluicing (Merchant 2001, Merchant 2006, Vicente 2018) and Argument Ellipsis (Takahashi 2014, Sakamoto 2020, Landau 2023b). In regard to the question of silence, we will compare models of LF-copying with models of PF-deletion. In regard to the question to identity, we will compare semantic conditions vs. syntactic conditions, paying attention to which aspects of the antecedent must be replicated in the ellipsis site as is and which aspects may vary between them (see Chung 2013, Merchant 2013, Anand et al. 2025, Landau 2023a). Overall, the course will familiarize you with the richness of data and theoretical thinking on this classic topic in generative syntax.

References
Anand, Pranav, Hardt, Daniel, and McCloskey, James. 2025. The Domain of Formal Matching in Sluicing. Linguistic Inquiry 56, 353-373.

Chung, Sandra. 2013. Syntactic Identity in Sluicing: How Much and Why. Linguistic Inquiry 44:1–44.

Depiante, Marcela A. 2001. On Null Complement Anaphora in Spanish and Italian. Probus 13:193-221.

Hankamer, Jorge, and Sag, Ivan A. 1976. Deep and Surface Anaphora. Linguistic Inquiry 7:391–428.

Landau, Idan. 2023a. Force Mismatch in Clausal Ellipsis. The Linguistic Review 40:419-460.

Landau, Idan. 2023b. Argument Ellipsis as External Merge After TRANSFER. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 41:793–845.

Lasnik, Howard, and Funakoshi, Kenshi. 2018. Ellipsis in Transformational Grammar. In The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis, ed. by Jeoren van Craenenbroeck and Tanja Temmerman, 46-74. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Merchant, Jason. 2001. The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands and the Theory of Ellipsis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Merchant, Jason. 2006. Sluicing. In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, ed. by Martin Evaraert and Henk Van Riemsdijk, 271-291. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Merchant, Jason. 2013. Voice and Ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 44:77-108.

Sakamoto, Yuta. 2020. Silently Structured Silent Argument. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Takahashi,

Daiko. 2014. Argument Ellipsis, Anti-Agreement and Scrambling. In Japanese Syntax in Comparative Perspective, ed. by Mamuro Saito, 88–116. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

van Craenenbroeck, Jeroen. 2014. VP-ellipsis. In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 2nd edition, ed. by Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, 1-35. Hoboken: Wiley- Blackwell.

Vicente, Luis. 2018. Sluicing and Its Subtypes. In The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis, ed. by Jeoren van Craenenbroeck and Tanja Temmerman, 479-503. Oxford: Oxford University Press.