In this article, we claim that syntactic objects undergoing ellipsis can be targeted by both narrow syntactic and PF operations. We base this conclusion on experimental evidence from the interaction between single conjunct agreement and verb-echo answers in South Slavic, which we show to be derived via verb-stranding VP-ellipsis. Adopting the view that Vocabulary Insertion replaces Q-variables on lexical heads (Halle 1991) and that ellipsis is a syntactic operation that deletes Q-variables (Saab 2022), we demonstrate that constituents properly included in the ellipsis site can undergo Internal Merge in the narrow syntax and can participate in PF processes from the derived position. The interaction between ellipsis, Internal Merge, and Agree-Copy that accounts for these patterns of data follows naturally within the Distributed Ellipsis approach.

This article presents novel data from ellipsis in Nupe, a Benue-Congo language of Nigeria, and explores its theoretical implications. Three claims are made. First, sluicing in Nupe counterexemplifies Merchant’s (2001) Sluicing-COMP Generalization. Second, ungrammatical outputs resulting from extraction from perfect clauses are salvaged by ellipsis, arguing against Kandybowicz’s (2009) analysis where such a restriction is a narrow-syntax derivational constraint. Third, COMP-trace effects in Nupe are also repaired under ellipsis, lending support to Kandybowicz’s (2009) claim that the Nupe COMP-trace effect is an interface phenomenon. Our findings provide evidence for the claim that ellipsis can repair certain otherwise ill-formed structures.

We discuss cases of salvation and non-salvation by deletion in the domain of lexical gaps, and distinguish two types of defectiveness: (a) defectiveness that can be saved by PF deletion, which we take to signal the lack of an eligible allomorph for certain environments within a language, and (b) defectiveness that cannot be saved by PF deletion, which we take to signal the lack of a proper alloseme for a given environment. With ellipsis modeled as an instruction for nonpronunciation on the PF branch of the grammar, only gaps on the Exponent List can be saved by it.