The Interfaces: Deriving and Interpreting Omitted Structures (review)

This collection contains thirteen (broadly) minimalist papers on ellipsis. Mostly English and German data are discussed, but virtually all types of ellipsis are referred to (VP-ellipsis, comparative deletion, ACD, gapping, pseudo-gapping, sluicing, right-node raising, etc.); the interaction between ellipsis and focus-structure is specially discussed in Part 3, and the argumentation leads to numerous interesting excursions into related syntactic and semantic matters, which makes the book unusually dense and rich.

The volume opens with a table of contents (v–vi), followed by the editors’ ‘Exploring the interfaces from the perspective of omitted structures’ (1–26), which discusses the role ellipsis plays in the ongoing minimalist debate about the architecture of the grammar, offers a taxonomy of generative approaches to the topic, and summarizes the papers. Unfortunately, this introduction is too sketchy to be illuminating, but several of the papers contain clearer overviews of previous work that partly make up for this deficiency.

The papers are grouped into three parts. Part 1 contains four that (broadly) treat ellipsis as PF-deletion: Christopher Kennedy’s ‘Ellipsis and syntactic representation’ (29–53), Jason Merchant’s ‘Subject-auxiliary inversion in comparatives and PF output constraints’ (55–77), Chris Wilder’s ‘Antecedent-containment and ellipsis’ (79–119), and Katharina Hartmann’s ‘Background matching in right node raising constructions’ (121–51). The four papers in Part 2 take ellipsis to be a core syntactic operation. They are Caterina Donati’s ‘Merge copy’ (155–75), Winfrid Lechner’s ‘Phrase structure paradoxes, movement and ellipsis’ (177–203), Uli Sauerland’s ‘Unpronounced heads in relative clauses’ (205–25), and Luis López and Susanne Winkler’s ‘Variation at the syntax-semantics interface: Evidence from gapping’ (227–48). Finally, Part 3 consists of five papers that (broadly) approach ellipsis from the angle of information structure. These papers include: Daniel Hardt’s ‘Ellipsis and the structure of discourse’ (251–62), Maribel Romero’s ‘Correlate restriction and definiteness effect in ellipsis’ (263–300), Kerstin Schwabe’s ‘F-marking and specificity in sluicing constructions’ (301–19), Satoshi Tomioka’s ‘The semantics of Japanese null pronouns and its cross-linguistic implications’ (321–39), and Petra Gretsch’s ‘Omission impossible? Topic and focus in focal ellipsis’ (341–65). Endnotes appear with each paper, but all of the references are listed at the end of the book (367–87), followed by a name index (389–93) and a subject index (395–99), which is particularly useful given the density and richness of the content.

The quality of the contributions is high, the data subtle, the references abundant and up-to-date, and all the obvious research alternatives in the current scene represented, so, on the whole, the volume is informative and offers a representative sample of recent ellipsis-related work within generative theory. However, no attempt has been made to integrate the results into a coherent whole or evaluate their compatibility with standard minimalist theory, which, given the presumed theoretical homogeneity of the contributors, is disappointing.

As to formal matters, the general appearance of the volume is, as usual in the series, outstanding, but there are quite a few editorial oversights and occasionally unintelligible short passages that should have been avoided in a book of this quality and price.