Elliptical phenomena in Hocak

This dissertation provides a generative syntactic analysis of three types of ellipsis in Hocak (Siouan) in which minimally the verb goes missing: verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), gapping and backward gapping. I argue that these three types of ellipsis have distinct derivations, and furthermore that the Hocak ellipsis data have theoretical implications for the analysis of these elliptical phenomena crosslinguistically. I propose that both VPE and gapping are derived by deletion, but that they differ in the size of the constituent that is targeted: VPE is VP deletion while gapping is TP deletion. In contrast, I provide evidence that backward gapping is derived by multidominance instead of deletion. I argue that VPE in Hocak is licensed by the active v head. I also demonstrate that object agreement is not possible with VPE, and argue that the agreement facts point to a derivational, rather than postsyntactic, analysis of ellipsis. I propose that the ellipsis site in gapping is derived by TP deletion that takes place after the subject and object remnants undergo movement to Topic and Focus positions in the left periphery of the clause. Gapping is permitted in embedded clauses in Hocak, while it is blocked in relative clauses and embedded wh-questions. I argue that gapping is licensed uniquely by non-interrogative C, and use the fact that Hocak does not exhibit sluicing as evidence in favor of that conclusion. In backward gapping environments, the shared verb agrees with the arguments of both conjuncts, exhibiting what is often called 'summative' or 'cumulative' agreement. The shared verb can also be found inside an embedded clause, and it still shows summative agreement when it is embedded. These facts are problematic for both deletion and across-the-board movement analyses of Right Node Raising and backward gapping, while a multidominance analysis can readily account for them.