ABSTRACT
Ellipsis is the cover term for a set of constructions involving a dependency between some overt antecedent phrase – typically, a predicate phrase – and an associated anaphoric expression: though it goes unpronounced, this silent anaphor is assumed to be part of the syntactic computation. Ellipsis phenomena pose theoretical, empirical, and methodological challenges. For the theoretician, the challenge is to explain the wide range of variation in the formal constraints applying to Ellipsis constructions cross-linguistically, whilst simultaneously distinguishing these constructions from other similar phenomena, such as VP-anaphora and null-object constructions. The empirical challenge for the L2 learner is to discover how ellipsis works in their target language, particularly where this setting differs from the L1 (which is the typical case). Finally, for the experimenter, the methodological challenge is to come up with methods to probe learners’ developing knowledge of this domain. In this chapter, I delineate the three properties of ellipsis that have attracted the most attention in the literature, namely, morphosyntactic recoverability, structural parallelism, and the strict vs. ‘sloppy’ resolution of anaphoric reference within the elided material. I summarize the empirical results obtained to date from different participant groups, concentrating on the SLA literature.
