Ellipsis requires syntactic and semantic identity. Evidence from Fragment Questions in Spanish

Abstract

Based on novel data from an understudied type of ellipsis in Spanish-which I refer to as Fragment Questions-I argue for the need of both semantic and syntactic identity conditions to license ellipsis. In particular the TP is subject to syntactic identity, and the domain above that is subject to semantic identity. Fragment Questions are elliptical sentences interpreted as wh-questions. They have a follow-up meaning and, unlike other types of sentential ellipsis, they require a wh-phrase to go unpronounced, although there's no explicit wh-question or wh-phrase in the antecedent. In this paper, I analyze Fragment Questions as the result of ellipsis of a wh-question from which a Contrastive Topic has moved.