ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Hungarian data showing that forward and backward ellipsis in coordinate clauses should both be regarded as the non-insertion of the phonological form into the representation of the sentence. Accordingly, fully specified lexical and grammatical features are present in the position of ellipsis (as well), and thus participate in the interpretation of sentence meaning. ‘Silent’ lexical items without a phonological form will be claimed to be subject to ellipsis. Lexical items with a phonological form, which make the identification of the former possible, are available in another, coordinated or subordinated clause. These will be called licensers. Based on the explicit licensing material, the lexical items which lack a phonological form (subject to ellipsis) have to be precisely identifiable within their clause. In this case ellipsis is licensed. (We are only concerned with ellipses characterizable by grammatical rules and not with those which arise exclusively from communicative, pragmatic or discourse conditions, like, for example, labels, titles or speech acts based on the context).
