NP-ellipsis Revisited: The Role of D-feature

This paper investigates the characteristics of NP-ellipsis that co-occurs with a non-nominal category (e.g. CP, NumP) in Japanese and Chinese. First, we show that the recent influential approach to NP-ellipsis by Saito, Lin, and Murasugi (2008, Journal of East Asian Linguistics) bears some inadequacy in explaining the contrast between Japanese and Chinese. We then demonstrate that clausal arguments in Japanese and Chinese behave differently in other domains as well, such as factive constructions and clausal subject constructions. We propose that these facts are correlated with each other, and that the key to understanding the cross-linguistic variation in NP-ellipsis is the role of D-feature. In particular, we argue that NP-ellipsis occurs only when a neighboring phrase contains a D-feature, which can be agreed with a higher D head. Crucially, languages may differ whether a non-nominal category may contain a D-feature or not. We claim that Japanese non-nominal categories such as CPs and NumPs do not carry a D-feature so that NP-ellipsis cannot be licensed regardless of its argument status, in contrast to Chinese counterparts. Our proposal has a theoretical implication that general scrambling and DP-internal movement have different sources - only the latter involves D-feature agreement.