Contextual anaphora relations in English nominal ellipsis

Park, Seulkee, Jong-Bok Kim, and Eunjeong Oh. 2024. Contextual anaphora relations in English nominal ellipsis. Linguistic Research 41(1): 65-90. 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.