Contextual anaphora relations in English nominal ellipsis

Contextual anaphora relations in English nominal ellipsis

The nominal (often called N′) ellipsis construction in English includes an understood material other than the remaining determiner. This elliptical NP tends to occur in contexts where its antecedent exhibits a similar or parallel structure. Popular analyses have derived such a construction with the postulation of the unexpressed materials and deletion operations, referring to the linguistic antecedent. However, our empirical investigation reveals a significant number of attested examples where the understood head noun refers to a discourse correlate, challenging such structure-based and movement operations. In this paper, based on such an empirical observation, we suggest a construction based analysis that allows us to refer to the inherently anaphoric (or deictic) or contextually anaphoric correlate of the understood head. This direction brings about a wider coverage of the empirical data.