Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2019
In this article, we take a detailed look at clausal ellipsis in Icelandic, a hitherto understudied phenomenon. We focus on case-matching and case-mismatching facts in fragment responses. We argue that although case matching is the norm, constrained instances of case mismatching strongly suggest that there must be silent structure in the ellipsis site, and some syntactic identity condition. We outline these patterns in detail, and provide an analysis that assumes a post-syntactic approach to case marking, and a hybrid identity condition along the lines of Chung (2013).
We would like to thank the editors of JoL and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on this manuscript, which have helped us improve it in many ways. We would also like to thank the Icelandic speakers who have shared their judgments of many sentences with us, including Dagbjört Guðmundsdóttir, Elín þórsdóttir, Hlíf Árnadóttir, Iris Edda Nowenstein, Kristín Jóhannsdóttir, Lilja Björk Stefánsdóttir, and Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir. For discussion of the content of this paper, we thank Anna Szabolcsi, Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson, and the audience and reviewers of NELS 48 at the University of Iceland.