Exploring clause structure through the lens of ellipsis

Principal investigator: Ekaterina Georgieva

This project is about elliptical structures in Udmurt and Meadow Mari, two minority languages of the Uralic language family. Ellipsis is a fascinating phenomenon: in the sentence ‘Peter met someone yesterday, but I don’t know who’, speakers understand the second part as ‘who (Peter met yesterday)’, although this meaning is supplied only by the question word, the rest of the clause is missing. Hence a major question in the syntactic theory has been how to account for the structure of elliptical phrases, that is, for the structure of silence. The project is the first study of ellipsis in Udmurt and Meadow Mari, the research focuses on ellipsis in the nominal, verbal and clausal domains. A central hypothesis is that the two languages have several strategies for expressing ellipsis and that these strategies represent different underlying structures. An important outcome of the analysis is that it will shed light on other grammatical properties of the two languages, which are interconnected with ellipsis. In this way, the project will deliver a more detailed linguistic description of these otherwise understudied languages. The findings of the project will directly inform the general theory of language, by presenting further evidence for what the structure of unpronounced syntactic phrases can be. Furthermore, the project also addresses another fundamental question in the theory of ellipsis, namely, variation: it looks into variation both between the two investigated languages and between the speakers of the same language; by taking into account the possible historical changes that might have affected the encoding of ellipsis.