Argument ellipsis and grammatical function mismatches

Abstract This chapter investigates ellipsis of arguments in Japanese, focusing on whether mismatches in grammatical functions between elided arguments and their antecedents interfere with the ellipsis process in question. Novel data involving extraction from elided arguments are presented, and they show that grammatical function mismatches do not block ellipsis of arguments. This finding supports the view that sentences with elided arguments involve ellipsis of those arguments rather than ellipsis of larger constituents like verb phrases that contain the affected arguments, strengthening the case for the argument ellipsis analysis, where ellipsis of an argument simply needs the presence of an antecedent argument regardless of its structural location.