2014/01/01 by Željko Bošković · 3 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · doi:10.1162/ling_a_00148
crossref issued 2014/01/01 · crossref published 2014/01/01 · crossref published-print 2014/01/01 · openalex publication_date 2014/01/01 · crossref created 2014/01/23 · crossref deposited 2024/05/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23 · crossref indexed 2026/07/29
On the basis of a number of cases where the status of X with respect to phasehood changes depending on the syntactic context in which X occurs, I argue for a contextual approach to phasehood whereby the highest phrase in the extended projection of all lexical categories—N, P, A, and V (passive and active)—functions as a phase. The relevant arguments concern extraction and ellipsis. I argue that ellipsis is phase-constrained: only phases and complements of phase heads can in principle undergo ellipsis. I show that Ā-extraction out of an ellipsis site is possible only if the ellipsis site corresponds to a phasal complement. I also provide evidence for the existence of several AspectPs, all of which have morphological manifestations, in the VP domain of English and show that they crucially affect the phasehood of this domain. The article provides a uniform account of a number of superficially different constructions involving extraction and ellipsis from Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, Turkish, and English.