VP and TP Ellipsis: sentential polarity and information structure

This paper focuses on two types of predicate ellipsis, namely Verbal Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), also known in the literature as Verb-stranding ellipsis, and Tense Phrase Ellipsis (TPE), also called Stripping or Polarity Ellipsis. It suggests that the polarity-encoding functional category ΣP is involved in the licensing of both types of predicate ellipsis, but only VPE requires that the verb be morphosyntactically associated with the Σ-head. The more restrictive licensing conditions imposed on VPE, relative to TPE, explain its more restricted distribution across languages. At the same time, it permits to account for the correlation between the availability of VPE and a particular type of (typologically rarer) answering system where the bare verb constitutes the unmarked pattern of minimal polar affirmative answer. The paper then concentrates on comparing VP and TP ellipsis in one of the few Romance languages where both types of predicate ellipsis are allowed, viz. European Portuguese, and describes their different articulation with discourse and infor-mation structure. The fact that VPE and TPE might not be in free variation in European Portuguese is shown to be a consequence of the different information structure of the elliptical clause in each type of ellipsis. VPE is an instance of single focus (that can be assigned to different constituents) and is subject to a parallelism constraint on contrastive topic structures (Kertz 2013); TPE features double focus bearing on the polarity word and the constituent preceding it.