Much current theorizing analyzes ellipsis as a PF operation silencing designated syntactic domains from which focal constituents are extracted prior to deletion. 1 In many cases, this requires exceptional evacuation movements that are not observed—and often altogether illicit—in corresponding nonelliptical forms. We introduce a novel set of data involving modal particles in German that militates strongly against obligatory movement of ellipsis remnants, suggesting that deletion instead applies to independently generated surface forms, in a manner analogous to deaccenting. The discussion will focus on clausal ellipsis only, ignoring other, crosslinguistically less common types of incompleteness such as VP-ellipsis and pseudogapping.

This article proposes a novel analysis of contrastive left-dislocation (CLD), according to which the left-dislocated XP is a remnant of clausal ellipsis. This analysis makes sense of the otherwise paradoxical fact that the dislocated XP shows connectivity into the clause it precedes, while other properties betray its clause-external status. The paradox is resolved by analyzing CLD as a juxtaposition of two parallel clauses, the first of which is reduced by deletion at PF. Akin to recent treatments of sluicing, fragment answers, split questions, and other phenomena, the analysis reduces CLD to an interplay of Ā-movement and ellipsis, thereby removing constructional residue from the theory of Universal Grammar.