Pronominal inflection and NP ellipsis in German
Andrew Murphy
October 2017 

Indefinite and possessive pronouns in German such as 'ein-es' (`one') and 'mein-er' (`mine') differ from their determiner counterparts in that they bear strong inflectional endings. Following Saab & Liptak (2016), I argue that this difference in inflection is due to NP ellipsis, which creates a 'stranded' affix that subsequently docks onto the determiner. Assuming that adjectives are re-attached by Local Dislocation allows us to account for the descriptive observation that the determiner and pronominal paradigms differ only in the same three exceptional cases where determiners do not bear overt inflection. Furthermore, I discuss how this approach can extend to similar data from Afrikaans, Dutch and English, as well as to split topicalization constructions in German. This analysis provides further support for Saab & Liptak's proposal that inflection emerges as a direct result of ellipsis, rather than constituting part of the licensing conditions on ellipsis (Lobeck 1995).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003049 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	to appear in The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics
keywords:	np ellipsis, morphology, strong inflection, german, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [October 2017] v1 [June 2016]
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