Agreeing to remain silent: the syntactic licensing of ellipsis

Taking data from Dutch and British English as a starting point, the present paper presents a theory of ellipsis licensing. Section 1 introduces the two basic approaches to ellipsis, namely proform and deletion, and the extraction test used in the literature to decide between them. In section two I present data from Dutch and British English providing a puzzle for the test. Section 3 puts forward my analysis involving deletion. I argue that ellipsis is syntactically licensed by an Agree relation between an ellipsis feature and a head licensing ellipsis and that it occurs in the course of the derivation, as soon as the licensor is merged. This analysis accounts for the extraction puzzle and can be applied to other elliptical phenomena as well (see Aelbrecht 2010)