The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Vera Gribanova, Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics, Stanford University.  Dr. Gribanova will speak on "The identity relation in ellipsis: variation in its domain of application".

Discussions of the identity relation in constituent ellipsis licensing often take for granted, either explicitly or implicitly, the idea that the identity relation in ellipsis ought to be uniform, and applicable across different ellipsis configurations and languages. Recent investigations of this relation — Rudin 2019, Anand et al. 2021, To appear, Stigliano 2022 — have provided novel evidence and arguments in support of the view that the domain of application of the identity relation is not always coextensive with the elided constituent itself. For example, although the prevailing view of English sluicing as TP ellipsis historically took the domain of the identity relation to likewise be the TP (Merchant, 2001), one of the main findings of the UCSC sluicing dataset is that material above the level of vP — e.g. tense/finiteness, modality, and polarity — can undergo felicitous mismatches. Generalizing beyond English sluicing, this raises the question of whether the domain of ellipsis identity must always be a proper subset of the domain of ellipsis itself, or if the specific size of the domain relevant for the identity relation may be variable across languages and ellipsis configurations.

In this talk, I present an investigation of some asymmetries in how case connectivity is enforced in two types of Russian clausal (TP) ellipsis — contrastive polarity ellipsis and fragment ellipsis — and develop an analysis explaining why these asymmetries take the shape that they do. The case study leverages the availabil- ity of a well-known case alternation between structural (nominative/accusative) case and genitive case under negation. The first asymmetry is that case connectivity on remnants of these two ellipsis types is enforced fully only in fragment ellipsis, but not in contrastive polarity ellipsis, in which a contrastive DP is fronted to the left periphery, preceding a polar particle (‘yes’ or ‘no’). The second asymmetry is that in contrastive polarity ellipsis, genitive patients under negation in the antecedent can correspond to an accusative patient remnant outside the ellipsis site, but not the reverse. To capture these asymmetries, I develop an analysis of the system of licensing relations that connects the syntax of polarity expression, negative concord, and genitive of negation, and combine this with a formulation of the identity relation in ellipsis in which head-to-head identity between the elided material and the antecedent must be invoked (Saab, 2008, 2010, 2022; Tanaka, 2011; Rudin, 2019; Stigliano, 2022).

For the asymmetries between these two types of Russian TP ellipsis to emerge within an internally con- sistent system of analytical commitments, it is critical that the domain of evaluation for identity in Russian TP ellipsis to be larger than in English sluicing, and likely coextensive with the elided TP. These findings support a view in which the domain of evaluation for the identity relation in (TP) ellipsis may vary across languages and ellipsis types. I argue that this overall picture is not consistent with an alternative interpretation of the facts, in which the domain of identity is always coextensive with the elided constituent, but subject to a looser isomorphism restriction which might still permit certain mismatches (Murphy, 2016; Ranero, 2021). Finally, I point to an implementation of ellipsis licensing that can straightforwardly capture variation in the size of the domain relevant to ellipsis identity. This implementation arises directly from unifying existing analyses (Aelbrecht, 2010; Stigliano, 2022) in which certain sub-parts of the ellipsis function — non-pronunciation, syntactic licensing, and the identity relation — can be either grouped together, or broken up across several distinct heads in the clausal spine.

Dr. Gribanova is a syntactician and a morphologist, with occasional forays into phonology. Her work focuses on phenomena whose analysis requires reference to all of these modules, and often involves detailed investigation of their interaction. She got her start as a linguist focusing primarily on Russian and Slavic languages; since 2009, she has also been working on the under-described Turkic languages of Central Asia (primarily Uzbek).

Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.