When Ellipsis Can Save Defectiveness and When It Can’t

• Autores: Gesoel Mendes, Andrew Nevins
• Localización: Linguistic inquiry, ISSN 0024-3892, Vol. 54, Nº 1, 2023, págs. 182-196
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • We discuss cases of salvation and non-salvation by deletion in the domain of lexical gaps, and distinguish two types of defectiveness: (a) defectiveness that can be saved by PF deletion, which we take to signal the lack of an eligible allomorph for certain environments within a language, and (b) defectiveness that cannot be saved by PF deletion, which we take to signal the lack of a proper alloseme for a given environment. With ellipsis modeled as an instruction for nonpronunciation on the PF branch of the grammar, only gaps on the Exponent List can be saved by it.