Korean VP-Ellipsis and a Derivational Approach to Ellipsis

This article argues that under the assumption that the verbal domain contains VoiceP, distinct from vP, Korean has VP-ellipsis, where the morpheme ha, which lacks semantic content, is located in v in the surface representation and its complement VP—consisting of a verbal noun and its preceding theme—is elided. It also proposes that ellipsis is a narrow syntax operation that removes only phonological feature matrices of terminals including lexical items, but preserves their formal feature matrices (cf. Abels 2012). As a result, since elided elements do not have an appropriate venue for inserting phonological features at PF, they are not pronounced. However, they are able to participate in formal operations occurring after ellipsis, contra Baltin (2007, 2012) and Aelbrecht (2010). This is supported by the fact that elements elided inside VP, which have been deprived of their phonological feature matrices, can establish an Agree relation with a head outside the ellipsis site or move farther out of the ellipsis site in narrow syntax. The article also argues that derivational ellipsis is constrained by a modified version of Richards’s (2016) Contiguity Theory.