NP-ellipsis with adjectival remnants: a micro-comparative perspective

Abstract

Two strategies of NP-ellipsis have been identified in the literature: (a) the elision strategy, and (b) the pronominalization strategy. The former has been said to be dependent on the presence of inflectional morphology (i.e., agreement) on the adjectival remnant. The latter strategy is used when the adjectival remnant does not carry any inflectional morphology. The aim of this article is to show that there are languages, among which Dutch, where morphological agreement appears to be the licensing factor, but where one-insertion (i.e., the pronominalization strategy) is the actual strategy. We arrive at this conclusion via an in-depth and systematic micro-comparative investigation of NPE in a number of closely related languages and dialects, more specifically: Afrikaans, Frisian, (standard) Dutch and dialectal variants of Dutch. English will be included in our analysis as well, since it is a core example of the pronominalization (i.e., one insertion) strategy. At a more theoretical level, it will be shown on the basis of close inspection of our micro-variation data that the pro-nouns involved in the pronominalization strategy have a composite structure. It will be shown that this decompositional analysis of pro-nouns brings together (i.e., unifies) the elision strategy and the pronominalization strategy. Another outcome of our study will be that languages/dialects may have available more than one NPE strategy.