Reprise fragments in English and Hungarian: Further support for an in-situ Q-equivalence approach to clausal ellipsis

Abstract:We present a comparative analysis of English and Hungarian reprise fragments. We argue that reprise fragments should be afforded the same theoretical treatment as standard (i.e. nonreprise) fragments. Assuming that standard fragmentary answers and questions are remnants of an ellipsis operation that applies to a clause, this entails that reprise fragments are also remnants of clausal ellipsis. We show that the prevailing approach to standard fragments, which assumes that the remnant of ellipsis always undergoes movement (Merchant 2001, 2004), cannot be plausibly extended to explain the crosslinguistic reprise-fragment data. We argue that a theory is required that restricts antecedents to interrogatives and that allows—but crucially does not require—movement of the remnant. Under this account, the differences observed between English and Hungarian reprise and standard fragments follow from independent syntactic differences in how standard and reprise questions are formed in these languages. We therefore provide new evidence to support theories of ellipsis identity that state that only questions make for suitable antecedents for clausal ellipsis (so-called Q-equivalence approaches) and to support sententialist analyses of clausal ellipsis that permit ellipsis to occur around designated constituents (so-called in-situ approaches).