Movement and deletion after syntax: Licensing by inflection reconsidered

Abstract

In this paper we study the interaction between ellipsis and inflectional morphology and put forward a generalization about ellipsis blocking the application of some morphological operations. Working in the Distributed Morphology framework, we will demonstrate this generalization in the realm of NP ellipsis. We will show that NP ellipsis can lead to stranded affix filter violations, and that there are various strategies languages can resort to in order to resolve problems of convergence that stranded affixes cause at the PF interface. The resolution of the stranded affix filter configuration is responsible for the well-known observation that heads preceding NP ellipsis sites need to show overt inflection in languages that inflect these heads (Lobeck 1995).