Licensing of nominal ellipsis in Hungarian possessives
Abstract
We argue, based on novel data, that the possessor head (Poss) can license ellipsis of its complement in Hungarian. That is, contra existing claims in the literature, possessor morphology can survive nominal ellipsis and be stranded on the remnant. Adopting Saab & Lipták (2016)’s of ellipsis licensing, we propose that there is variation in the size of the ellipsis site in Hungarian: nominal ellipsis can be licensed by either Num or Poss. We further propose that nominal ellipsis licensed by Poss can capture a previously unanalyzed variation in the Hungarian possessive pronoun paradigm. Specifically, the two variants of possessive pronouns correspond to two different structures: one is the anaphoric possessive (see Dékány 2015), while the other exists only as a consequence of nominal ellipsis, which, as we show, is a productive possibility.
Keywords
ellipsis; nominal ellipsis; possessives; Hungarian
Full Text:
PDFDOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4994
Copyright (c) 2021 Eszter Ronai, Laura Stigliano

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Linguistic Society of America
Advancing the Scientific Study of Language since 1924
ISSN (online): 2473-8689
This publication is made available for free to readers and with no charge to authors thanks in part to your continuing LSA membership and your donations to the open access fund.