The status of argument ellipsis as NP ellipsis or DP ellipsis

Abstract Landau (2023a. Argument ellipsis as external merge after transfer. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 41(2). 793–845) argues against Tomioka (2003. The semantics of Japanese null pronouns and its cross-linguistic implications. In Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds.), The interfaces: Deriving and interpreting omitted structures , 321–339. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) and Bošković (2018. On pronouns, clitic doubling, and argument ellipsis: Argument ellipsis as predicate ellipsis. English Linguistics 35(1). 1–37) regarding their claim that argument ellipsis (AE) sites denote properties, namely something of semantic type , by demonstrating that they denote individuals, something of semantic type . In this article, I defend Tomioka (2003. The semantics of Japanese null pronouns and its cross-linguistic implications. In Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds.), The interfaces: Deriving and interpreting omitted structures , 321–339. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) and Bošković (2018. On pronouns, clitic doubling, and argument ellipsis: Argument ellipsis as predicate ellipsis. English Linguistics 35(1). 1–37) by arguing that Landau’s (2023a. Argument ellipsis as external merge after transfer. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 41(2). 793–845) observation that null arguments must denote individuals is explained by positing pro as occupying the head of DP and functioning as a type-shifting operator that applies to the material copied onto its null NP complement and returns an entity of semantic type . I further address the question raised by Landau (2025. Type-restricted argument ellipsis and generalized quantifiers. Linguistic Inquiry 56(1). 97–129) whether generalized quantifiers can serve as antecedents for AE. Demonstrating that this is possible in Japanese, in contrast with languages like Hebrew, I suggest that when the antecedents of null arguments include strong determiners, they involve DP ellipsis rather than NP ellipsis and that the availability of DP ellipsis should be parametrized. At the same time, I argue that there is a seemingly universal constraint that applies to both Japanese and Hebrew, which prohibits a null argument taking a quantificational phrase as its antecedent from interacting scopally with other scope-bearing elements.