Ellipsis in the AN&A construction in Old English
Master thesis
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http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2458209Utgivelsesdato
2017Metadata
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Sammendrag
In my thesis, I argue for an ellipsis in the strict AN&A construction in Old English, which is also known as the postposed and-adjective construction (Fischer, 2012) or the postnominal ‘and adjective’ construction (Haumann, 2003). This construction is a case of a prenominal adjective modifying a noun followed by a single postnominal adjective. By ‘strict’, I mean those cases of AN&A where the construction only has one single referent and does not refer to two distinct referents. I argue that an ellipsis approach is a likelier explanation for the syntax of the strict AN&A construction than the extraposition approach. While Fischer (2012) follows the extraposition approach, my approach resembles the one in Haumann (2003), wherein she proposes that the second adjective is accompanied by a null prominal (pro). The extraposition explanation has certain weaknesses, such as the limitations created by the Coordinate Structure Constraint (CSC), which prohibits the movement of a conjunct in a coordination structure. The extraposition approach is thus, unlike the ellipsis approach, a theoretical cost for coordination theory.
This then leaves us with one option which is less desirable due to the theoretical cost for the theory of coordination, extraposition, and another option which is more desirable, ellipsis, as it would be a solution without the need for any extra rules. If OE has an ellipsis rule independently of AN&A, it would be plausible that ellipsis is behind the strict AN&A construction and not extraposition. Given that this is true, there would be no need to create an extra rule for extraposition to allow it to circumvent CSC. To support the ellipsis approach, I used a corpus to locate examples of Noun Phrase Ellipsis (NPE) outside of the AN&A construction in OE. The existence of NPE outside of AN&A and the problems with the extraposition approach thus support the ellipsis approach.