Argument ellipsis as topic deletion

• Published in: Natural language and linguistic theory Vol. 43; no. 3; pp. 1551 - 1606
• Main Author: Mizuno, Teruyuki
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.08.2025; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Argumentation; Discourse analysis; Ellipsis; Japanese language; Linguistics; Natural language; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Philosophy of Language; Social Sciences; Syntactic movement; Syntax; Topics; Argument ellipsis; Topicalization; Wh-phrases; Discourse pro-drop; Japanese
• ISSN: 0167-806X; 1573-0859
• DOI: 10.1007/s11049-024-09645-1

In recent syntactic literature, argument ellipsis has become a productive perspective of investigation for null arguments in natural language. Focusing on Japanese as the primary object of study, this paper aims to deepen our understanding of the underlying syntactic mechanism behind the derivation of argument ellipsis. The main empirical observation is that argument ellipsis and topicalization exhibit a striking parallelism with respect to the way they interact with wh -dependencies. Building on this observation, I argue that argument ellipsis is an instance of topic deletion, which involves movement of arguments to Spec,TopicP, and phonological deletion of the arguments under the identity of the topic in discourse. I show that the topic-deletion account of argument ellipsis offers a principled explanation for a variety of restrictions concerning what types of argument can or cannot undergo ellipsis. I also suggest that the proposed account enables a unified perspective on argument ellipsis and discourse pro -drop by analyzing them uniformly as instances of topic deletion, thereby shedding new light on the deep typological correlation that has been observed between them.