The (non-)survival of discourse particles in ellipsis
This talk provides a uniform analysis to clausal ellipsis with the discourse particles e.g., fragments in Thai and sluicing in Colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish), as in (1-2) respectively.
(1) Thai
A:
nákrian kamlaŋ rian sinthɛks
student PROG read syntax
'The students are studying Syntax.'
B1:
simɛntiks tàːŋhàːk (khâ)
semantics FOC.contrastive (POL.F)
B2:
simɛntiks (khâ)
semantics (POL.F)
'It’s Semantics that the students are studying.'
(2) Singlish
A:
Mary reading some book.
'Mary is reading some book.'
B:
Which book (áh)?
'Which book?'
While the focus and politeness particles are optional in Thai fragment (1), the question particle is also optional in Singlish sluicing (2). In this work, I argue that the discourse particles e.g., focus, politeness, and question particles - project head-finality projection at a clausal periphery cf. Abels & Neeleman (2012), a different view to the LCA-based analyses (Kayne 1994) and FOFC-compliance analyses (Biberauer, Holmberg & Roberts 2008, Sheehan et al. 2017). Empirical evidence to support this claim comes from (i) their sensitivity to clause type, (ii) distributional restrictions, (ii) scope facts, and (iv) verb-echo answer tests. I demonstrate that these discourse particles are strongly associated with the speaker’s attitudes/mood and they occur structurally very high (above the subject of the matrix clause) cf. Miyagawa (2022). They are essentially part of the non-elliptical variants (e.g., Merchant 2001: 110-173, Murasiac et al. 2018).
Following Benbaji-Elhadad and Pesetsky (2024), I postulate that the elliptical constructions as in (1-2) involve two syntactic operations: A’-movement to the left periphery and E-Extension. In this analysis, ellipsis can be licensed from either the trace of the moving head or the targeted head. Rather assuming that the size of E-(llipsis) site varies as to individual language, I propose that the E-site is a minimal projection deletion and the licensing head of ellipsis is part of the E-site – in line with with the C’-deletion approach. This system can fully capture the distribution of discourse particles in other languages e.g., -yo in Korean fragments and -kah in Indonesian sluicing.