Lower ellipses - gapping, VP and null objects: a look into their licensing conditions

• Grant number: 13/12173-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: October 15, 2013
• End date: February 14, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Ruth Elisabeth Vasconcellos Lopes
• Grantee: Ruth Elisabeth Vasconcellos Lopes
• Host Investigator: Jason Merchant
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Chicago, United States

Abstract

Our aim is to examine the syntactic licensing conditions of "low" ellipses in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We take "low" ellipses here as cases involving the deletion of some vP-VP material. We also intend to examine what features license "low" ellipses in some languages, while banning them in others. That's the case of VP ellipsis in Portuguese as compared to other Romance languages. We will treat here anaphoric null objects in BP as cases of ellipsis as well, following Cyrino (1997), assuming Cyrino & Lopes (2013) analysis as cases of DP ellipsis, although quite comparable to the VP ellipsis ones. Still following Cyrino & Lopes (2013), we will propose that the "low" ellipses in BP are licensed by ASP which bares an uninterpretable E(llipsis)-feature, as proposed by Merchant (2001). (AU)