Concessive although-stripping and its theoretical implications

This paper investigates concessive although-stripping in English, a phenomenon where the so-called Stripping or Bare Argument Ellipsis (BAE) occurs in although-clauses. This elliptical construction has at least two sub-patterns: positive and negative although-stripping. Departing from the sentential ellipsis analyses that postulate clausal sources for the construction and deletion processes, in the paper we suggest a non-clausal WYSWYG (what you see is what you get) approach that directly projects the construction from a nonsentential fragment. The support for this direction comes from our corpus investigation. The attested data show that the connectivity effects, claimed to support the ellipsis analyses, can often be overridden, and further that contextual cues play key roles in licensing the construction in question.