The aim of this paper is to argue for a particular analysis of null clausal arguments in terms of ellipsis. It is first illustrated that null clausal arguments have underlying syntactic structures that are subject to ellipsis. The main and novel observation for this claim is that null clausal arguments exhibit the effect of the parallelism constraint that other ellipsis constructions like verb phrase ellipsis are also subject to, along the line of Takahashi (Proceedings of FAJL 6: formal approaches to Japanese linguistics, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Cambridge, pp 203–213, 2013). It then examines a hitherto unexplored construction, called antecedent-contained clausal argument ellipsis, where a null clausal argument appears to be properly contained by its antecedent. Although the construction can be readily accommodated by assuming the ellipsis process that directly elides arguments (argument ellipsis), it raises serious difficulties for its alternative analysis that employs the ellipsis process targeting a VP whose head has evacuated it (verb-stranding VP-ellipsis). This paper thus provides a novel case where the argument ellipsis analysis is required, no matter how well the verb-stranding VP-ellipsis analysis accommodates other null argument phenomena.

中文翻译：

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先行包含的子句省略号

本文的目的是主张对用省略号表示的空子句论证进行特殊分析。首先说明了空子句自变量具有受省略号影响的潜在句法结构。此主张的主要和新颖的观察结果是，空子句论证表现出平行约束的效果，类似于高桥（FAJL会议录6：日本语言学的正式方法，例如动词短语省略号）也受制于其他省略号构造。麻省理工学院《语言学工作论文》，剑桥，第203–213页，2013年）。然后，它研究了一种迄今尚未探索的结构，称为先例-包含子句省略号，其中空子句参数似乎已由其先行词正确包含。虽然结构可以容易地容纳在由假设的省略号过程直接elides参数（参数省略号），它提出了对采用的省略号过程靶向VP其头部已抽空它其替代分析严重困难（动词-绞合VP -省略号） 。因此，本文提供了一个新颖的案例，其中无论动词链形VP-省略号分析如何很好地适应其他空置的替换现象，都需要进行参数省略号分析。