THE SYNTAX OF LITTLE THINGS

VIDAL VALMALA

Abstract

Proceedings of IATL 23

Many of the utterances we produce often consist of little things (DPs, VPs, APs, etc.) which, at least at the level of Phonological Form (PF), are non-sentential in nature. Here I adhere to the view that these little things do not derive from full sentences, i.e. they have little syntax. Specifically, I argue against the most recent and influential ellipsis analysis of these constructions developed in Merchant (2004) and explore some of the consequences of assuming the existence of non-sentential constituents for the theory of grammar from the perspective of Principles and Parameters. I also propose that non-sentential constituents are pure focus constructions built on the basis of numerations containing only lexical elements with the feature [+Focus], a hypothesis which allows us to explain many of the properties of non-sentential answers.



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