Elliptical Contrastive Topic Construction and Theories of Multi-elemental Fragments

To account for the positional (final vs. non-final) asymmetry observed in elliptical contexts (Park 2005, 2013, Park and Shin 2014, Ku and Cho 2014, Chung 2015a, b, among others), several proposals have been made in the literature including An’s (2016, 2018) extra deletion approach, Ahn and Cho’s (2017a, b) repetitive gapless right dislocation analysis, and Chung’s (2015a, b) oblique merge approach. This article addresses a novel type of fragment called an elliptical contrastive topic construction (ECTC, Chung 2020) and examines which of the theories proposed thus far best accounts for the characteristics of the construction. In particular, it will be shown that neither An’s nor Ahn and Cho’s theory properly captures certain important syntactic and semantic properties of the ECTC, while there is some room for Chung’s approach to accommodate them.