Derivational argument ellipsis

Abstract The present article is concerned with two important observations about argument ellipsis. One is that it may apply to arguments that do not enter into agreement relationship with functional categories but not to those that do; the other is that extraction out of elided arguments is possible in Japanese. In order to account for these properties, I adopt the theory of derivational ellipsis, according to which elliptic constituents are marked as such as early as in the syntactic component, and the hypothesis that v, V, and an internal argument can be combined in different ways in different languages. The proposed analysis does not only account for the relevant facts about argument ellipsis in Japanese, but also extends to other languages that exhibit slightly different behaviors with regard to null arguments.